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SEA WARFARE 



Books by Rudyard Kipling 


Actions and Reactions 


Life's Handicap: Being 


Brushwood Boy, The 


Stories of Mine Own 


Captains Courageous 


People 


Collected Verse 


Light That Failed, The 


Day's Work, The 


Many Inventions 


Departmental Ditties and 


Naulahka, The (With Wol- 


Ballads and Barrack- 


cott Balestier) 


Room Ballads 


Plain Tales from the Hills 


Five Nations, The 


Puck of Pook's Hill 


France at War 


Rewards and Fairies 


Fringes of the Fleet, The 


Seven Seas, The 


From Sea to Sea 


Soldier Stories 


History of England, A 


Soldiers Three, The Story 


Jungle Book, The 


of the Gadsbys, and In 


Jungle Book, Second 
Just So Song Book 


Black and White 
Song of the English, A 
Songs From Books 


Just So Stories 


Stalky & Co. 


Kim 


They 


Kipling Stories and Poems 


Traffics and Discoveries 


Every Child Should 


Under the Deodars, The 


Know 


Phantom Rickshaw, and 


Kipling Birthday Book, 


Wee Willie Winkie 


The 


With the Night Mail 



SEA WARFARE 



BY 



RUDYARD KIPLING 




GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK 

DOUBLEDAY. PAGE & COMPANY 

1917 



J 






COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY 
RUDYARD KIPLING 




^CI.A455879 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The Fbinges of the Fleet 1 

Tales of "The Trade" 93 

Destroyers at Jutland 145 



THE FRINGES OF THE FLEET 

(1915) 



In Lowestoft a boat was laid, 

Mark well what I do say ! 
And she was built for the herring trade, 

But she has gone a-rovin', a-rovin', a-rovin' , 

The Lord knows where ! 

They gave her Government coal to burn, 
And a Q. F. gun at boiv and stern, 
And sent her out a-rovin, etc. 

Her skipper was mate of a bucko ship 
Which always killed one man per trip, 
So he is used to rovin, etc. 

Her mate was skipper of a chapel in Wales, 
And so he fights in topper and tails — 
Religi-ous tho' rovin', etc. 

Her engineer is fifty-eight, 

So he's prepared to meet his fate, 

Which ain't unlikely rovin', etc. 

3 



4 SEA WARFARE 

Her leading -stoker' s seventeen, 

So he don't know what the Judgments mean, 

Unless he cops 'em rovin', etc. 

Her cook was chef in the Lost Dogs' Home, 

Mark well what I do say t 
And I'm sorry for Fritz when they all come 

A-rovin', a-rovin', a-roarin' and a-rovin ', 

Round the North Sea rovin', 

The Lord knows where I 



THE AUXILIARIES 



The Navy is very old and very wise. Much 
of her wisdom is on record and available 
for reference; but more of it works in the 
unconscious blood of those who serve her. 
She has a thousand years of experience, and 
can find precedent or parallel for any situa- 
tion that the force of the weather or the 
malice of the King's enemies may bring 
about. 

The main principles of sea warfare hold 
good throughout all ages, and, so far as the 
Navy has been allowed to put out her strength, 
these principles have been applied over all 
the seas of the world. For matters of 
detail the Navy, to whom all days are alike, 
has simply returned to the practice and 
resurrected the spirit of old days. 



6 SEA WARFARE 

In the late French wars, a merchant 
sailing out of a Channel port might in a 
few hours find himself laid by the heels 
and under way for a French prison. His 
Majesty's ships of the Line, and even the 
big frigates, took little part in policing the 
waters for him, unless he were in convoy. 
The sloops, cutters, gun-brigs, and local 
craft of all kinds were supposed to look after 
that, while the Line was busy elsewhere. 
So the merchants passed resolutions against 
the inadequate protection afforded to the 
trade, and the narrow seas were full of 
single-ship actions; mail-packets, West 
Country brigs, and fat East Indiamen fight- 
ing, for their own hulls and cargo, anything 
that the watchful French ports sent against 
them; the sloops and cutters bearing a hand 
if they happened to be within reach. 

The Oldest Navy 

It was a brutal age, ministered to by 
hard-fisted men, and we had put it a hundred 
decent years behind us when — it all comes 
back again! To-day there are no prisons 



THE FRINGES OF THE FLEET 7 

for the crews of merchantmen, but they can 
go to the bottom by mine and torpedo even 
more quickly than their ancestors were run 
into Le Havre. The submarine takes the 
place of the privateer; the Line, as in the 
old wars, is occupied, bombarding and 
blockading, elsewhere, but the sea-borne 
traffic must continue, and that is being 
looked after by the lineal descendants of the 
crews of the long extinct cutters and sloops 
and gun-brigs. The hour struck, and they 
reappeared, to the tune of fifty thousand 
odd men in more than two thousand ships, 
of which I have seen a few hundred. 
Words of command may have changed a 
little, the tools are certainly more complex, 
but the spirit of the new crews who come 
to the old job is utterly unchanged. It is 
the same fierce, hard-living, heavy-handed, 
very cunning service out of which the Navy 
as we know it to-day was born. It is called 
indifferently the Trawler and Auxiliary 
Fleet. It is chiefly composed of fishermen, 
but it takes in every one who may have 
maritime tastes — from retired admirals to 



8 SEA WARFARE 

the sons of the sea-cook. It exists for the 
benefit of the traffic and the annoyance of 
the enemy. Its doings are recorded by 
flags stuck into charts; its casualties are 
buried in obscure corners of the newspapers. 
The Grand Fleet knows it slightly; the 
restless light cruisers who chaperon it from 
the background are more intimate; the 
destroyers working off unlighted coasts over 
unmarked shoals come, as you might say, in 
direct contact with it; the submarine alter- 
nately praises and — since one periscope is 
very like another — curses its activities; but 
the steady procession of traffic in home 
waters, liner and tramp, six every sixty 
minutes, blesses it altogether. 

Since this most Christian war includes 
laying mines in the fairways of traffic, and 
since these mines may be laid at any time 
by German submarines especially built for 
the work, or by neutral ships, all fairways 
must be swept continuously day and night. 
When a nest of mines is reported, traffic 
must be hung up or deviated till it is cleared 
out. When traffic comes up Channel it 



THE FRINGES OF THE FLEET 9 

must be examined for contraband and other 
things; and the examining tugs lie out in 
a blaze of lights to remind ships of this. 
Months ago, when the war was young, the 
tugs did not know what to look for 
specially. Now they do. All this mine- 
searching and reporting and sweeping, plus 
the direction and examination of the traffic, 
plus the laying of our own ever-shifting 
mine-fields, is part of the Trawler Fleet's 
work, because the Navy-as-we-knew-it is 
busy elsewhere. And there is always the 
enemy submarine with a price on her head, 
whom the Trawler Fleet hunts and traps 
with zeal and joy. Add to this, that there 
are boats, fishing for real fish, to be protected 
in their work at sea or chased off dangerous 
areas whither, because they are strictly for- 
bidden to go, they naturally repair, and you 
will begin to get some idea of what the 
Trawler and Auxiliary Fleet does. 

The Ships and the Men 

Now, imagine the acreage of several 
dock-basins crammed, gunwale to gunwale, 



10 SEA WARFARE 

with brown and umber and ochre and rust- 
red steam-trawlers, tugs, harbour-boats, and 
yachts once clean and respectable, now 
dirty and happy. Throw in fish-steamers, 
surprise-packets of unknown lines and in- 
describable junks, sampans, lorchas, cata- 
marans, and General Service stink-pontoons 
filled with indescribable apparatus, manned 
by men no dozen of whom seem to talk the 
same dialect or wear the same clothes. The 
mustard-coloured jersey who is cleaning a 
six-pounder on a Hull boat clips his words 
between his teeth and would be happier in 
Gaelic. The whitish singlet and grey 
trousers held up by what is obviously his 
soldier brother's spare regimental belt is 
pure Lowestoft. The complete blue-serge- 
and-soot suit passing a wire down a hatch is 
Glasgow as far as you can hear him, which 
is a fair distance, because he wants something 
done to the other end of the wire, and the 
flat-faced boy who should be attending to it 
hails from the remoter Hebrides, and is 
looking at a girl on the dock-edge. The 
bow-legged man in the ulster and green- 



THE FRINGES OF THE FLEET 11 

worsted comforter is a warm Grimsby 
skipper, worth several thousands. He and 
his crew, who are mostly his own relations, 
keep themselves to themselves, and save 
their money. The pirate with the red 
beard, barking over the rail at a friend with 
gold earrings, comes from Skye. The friend 
is West Country. The noticeably insignifi- 
cant man with the soft and deprecating eye 
is skipper and part-owner of the big slashing 
Iceland trawler on which he droops like 
a flower. She is built to almost Western 
Ocean lines, carries a little boat-deck aft 
with tremendous stanchions, has a nose 
cocked high against ice and sweeping seas, 
and resembles a hawk-moth at rest. The 
small, sniffing man is reported to be a "holy 
terror at sea." 

Hunters and Fishers 

The child in the Pullman-car uniform 
just going ashore is a wireless operator, aged 
nineteen. He is attached to a flagship at 
least 120 feet long, under an admiral aged 
twenty-five, who was, till the other day, 



12 SEA WARFARE 

third mate of a North Atlantic tramp, but 
who now leads a squadron of six trawlers to 
hunt submarines. The principle is simple 
enough. Its application depends on circum- 
stances and surroundings. One class of 
German submarines meant for murder off 
the coasts may use a winding and rabbit-like 
track between shoals where the choice of 
water is limited. Their career is rarely 
long, but, while it lasts, moderately exciting. 
Others, told off for deep-sea assassinations, 
are attended to quite quietly and without 
any excitement at all. Others, again, work 
the inside of the North Sea, making no 
distinction between neutrals and Allied 
ships. These carry guns, and since their 
work keeps them a good deal on the surface, 
the Trawler Fleet, as we know, engages 
them there — the submarine firing, sinking, 
and rising again in unexpected quarters; 
the trawler firing, dodging, and trying to 
ram. The trawlers are strongly built, and 
can stand a great deal of punishment. Yet 
again, other German submarines hang about 
the skirts of fishing-fleets and fire into the 



THE FRINGES OF THE FLEET 13 

brown of them. When the war was young 
this gave splendidly "frightful" results, but 
for some reason or other the game is not as 
popular as it used to be. 

Lastly, there are German submarines 
who perish by ways so curious and in- 
explicable that one could almost credit the 
whispered idea (it must come from the 
Scotch skippers) that the ghosts of the 
women they drowned pilot them to de- 
struction. But what form these shadows 
take — whether of "The Lusitania Ladies," 
or humbler stewardesses and hospital nurses 
— and what lights or sounds the thing 
fancies it sees or hears before it is blotted 
out, no man will ever know. The main 
fact is that the work is being done. 
Whether it was necessary or politic to 
re-awaken by violence every sporting in- 
stinct of a sea-going people is a question 
which the enemy may have to consider 
later on. 



Dawn off the Foreland — the young flood 
making 
Jumbled and short and steep — 
Black in the hollows and bright where it's 
breaking — 
Awkward water to sweep. 
"Mines reported in the fairway, 
" Warn all traffic and detain. 
"'Sent up Unity, Claribel, Assyrian, Storm- 
cock, and Golden Gain." 

Noon off the Foreland — the first ebb making 

Lumpy and strong in the bight. 
Boom after boom, and the golf-hut shaking 
And the jackdaws wild with fright I 
"Mines located in the fairway, 
"Boats now working up the chain, 
"Sweepers — Unity, Claribel, Assyrian, 
Stormcock, and Golden Gain." 
is 



16 SEA WARFARE 

Dusk off the Foreland — the last light going 

And the traffic crowding through, 
And jive damned trawlers with their syreens 
blowing 
Heading the whole review ! 
"Sweep completed in the fairway. 
"No more mines remain. 
" 'Sent back Unity, Claribel, Assyrian, Storm- 
cock, and Golden Gain." 



THE AUXILIARIES 

II 

The Trawlers seem to look on mines as 
more or less fairplay. But with the torpedo 
it is otherwise. A Yarmouth man lay on 
his hatch, his gear neatly stowed away 
below, and told me that another Yarmouth 
boat had "gone up," with all hands except 
one. "'Twas a submarine. Not a mine," 
said he. "They never gave our boys no 
chance. Na! She was a Yarmouth boat 
— we knew 'em all. They never gave the 
boys no chance." He was a submarine 
hunter, and he illustrated by means of 
matches placed at various angles how the 
blindfold business is conducted. "And 
then," he ended, "there's always what he'll 
do. You've got to think that out for 

17 



18 SEA WARFARE 

yourself — while you're working above him 
— same as if 'twas fish." I should not care 
to be hunted for the life in shallow waters 
by a man who knows every bank and pot- 
hole of them, even if I had not killed his 
friends the week before. Being nearly all 
fishermen they discuss their work in terms 
of fish, and put in their leisure fishing over- 
side, when they sometimes pull up ghastly 
souvenirs. But they all want guns. Those 
who have three-pounders clamour for sixes ; 
sixes for twelves; and the twelve-pound 
aristocracy dream of four-inchers on anti- 
aircraft mountings for the benefit of roving 
Zeppelins. They will all get them in time, 
and I fancy it will be long ere they give 
them up. One West Country mate an- 
nounced that "a gun is a handy thing to 
have aboard — always." "But in peace- 
time?" I said. "Wouldn't it be in the 
way?" 

"We'm used to 'em now," was the 
smiling answer. "Niver go to sea again 
without a gun — I wouldn't — if I had my 
way. It keeps all hands pleased-like." 



THE FRINGES OF THE FLEET 19 

They talk about men in the Army who 
will never willingly go back to civil life. 
What of the fishermen who have tasted 
something sharper than salt water — and 
what of the young third and fourth mates 
who have held independent commands for 
nine months past? One of them said to 
me quite irrelevantly: "I used to be the 
animal that got up the trunks for the 
women on baggage-days in the old Bodiam 
Castle," and he mimicked their requests for 
"the large brown box," or "the black dress 
basket," as a freed soul might scoff at his 
old life in the flesh. 



"A Common Sweeper" 

My sponsor and chaperon in this Eliza- 
bethan world of eighteenth-century seamen 
was an A.B. who had gone down in the 
Landrail, assisted at the Heligoland fight, 
seen the Blucher sink and the bombs 
dropped on our boats when we tried to 
save the drowning ("Whereby," as he 
said, "those Germans died gottstrafin' 



20 SEA WARFARE 

their own country because we didn't wait 
to be strafed"), and has now found more 
peaceful days in an Office ashore. He led 
me across many decks from craft to craft 
to study the various appliances that they 
specialise in. Almost our last was what 
a North Country trawler called a "common 
sweeper," that is to say, a mine-sweeper. 
She was at tea in her shirt-sleeves, and 
she protested loudly that there was "noth- 
ing in sweeping." '"See that wire rope?" 
she said. "Well, it leads through that 
lead to the ship which you're sweepin' with. 
She makes her end fast and you make 
yourn. Then you sweep together at which- 
ever depth you've agreed upon between 
you, by means of that arrangement there 
which regulates the depth. They give you 
a glass sort o' thing for keepin' your distance 
from the other ship, but that's not wanted 
if you know each other. Well, then, you 
sweep, as the sayin' is. There's nothin' in 
it. You sweep till this wire rope fouls the 
bloomin' mines. Then you go on till they 
appear on the surface, so to say, and then 



THE FRINGES OF THE FLEET 21 

you explodes them by means of shootin' at 
'em with that rifle in the galley there. 
There's nothin' in sweepin' more than 
that." 

"And if you hit a mine?" I asked. 

"You go up — but you hadn't ought to 
hit 'em, if you're careful. The thing is to 
get hold of the first mine all right, and then 
you go on to the next, and so on, in a way 
o' speakin'." 

"And you can fish, too, 'tween times," 
said a voice from the next boat. A man 
leaned over and returned a borrowed mug. 
They talked about fishing — notably that 
once they caught some red mullet, which 
the "common sweeper" and his neighbour 
both agreed was "not natural in those 
waters." As for mere sweeping, it bored 
them profoundly to talk about it. I only 
learned later as part of the natural history 
of mines, that if you rake the tri-nitro- 
toluol by hand out of a German mine you 
develop eruptions and skin-poisoning. But 
on the authority of two experts, there is 
nothing in sweeping. Nothing whatever! 



22 SEA WARFARE 

A Block in the Traffic 

Now imagine, not a pistol-shot from 
these crowded quays, a little Office hung 
round with charts that are pencilled and 
noted over various shoals and soundings. 
There is a movable list of the boats at 
work, with quaint and domestic names. 
Outside the window lies the packed harbour 
— outside that again the line of traffic up 
and down — a stately cinema-show of six 
ships to the hour. For the moment the 
film sticks. A boat — probably a "common 
sweeper" — reports an obstruction in a 
traffic lane a few miles away. She has 
found and exploded one mine. The Office 
heard the dull boom of it before the wire- 
less report came in. In all likelihood there 
is a nest of them there. It is possible that 
a submarine may have got in last night 
between certain shoals and laid them out. 
The shoals are being shepherded in case 
she is hidden anywhere, but the boundaries 
of the newly discovered mine-area must be 
fixed and the traffic deviated. There is a 



THE FRINGES OF THE FLEET 23 

tramp outside with tugs in attendance. 
She has hit something and is leaking badly. 
Where shall she go? The Office gives her 
her destination — the harbour is too full for 
her to settle down here. She swings off 
between the faithful tugs. Down coast 
some one asks by wireless if they shall hold 
up their traffic. It is exactly like a signaller 
"offering" a train to the next block. "Yes," 
the Office replies. "Wait a while. If it's 
what we think, there will be a little delay. 
If it isn't what we think, there will be a 
little longer delay." Meantime, sweepers 
are nosing round the suspected area — 
"looking for cuckoos' eggs," as a voice 
suggests; and a patrol-boat lathers her 
way down coast to catch and stop anything 
that may be on the move, for skippers are 
sometimes rather careless. Words begin 
to drop out of the air into the chart-hung 
Office. "Six and a half cables south, 
fifteen east" of something or other. "Mark 
it well, and tell them to work up from 
there," is the order. "Another mine ex- 
ploded!" "Yes, and we heard that too," 



24 SEA WARFARE 

says the Office. "What about the sub- 
marine?" "Elizabeth Hug gins reports ..." 
Elizabeth's scandal must be fairly high 
flavoured, for a torpedo-boat of immoral 
aspect slings herself out of harbour and 
hastens to share it. If Elizabeth has not 
spoken the truth, there may be words be- 
tween the parties. For the present a 
pencilled suggestion seems to cover the 
case, together with a demand, as far as one 
can make out, for "more common sweepers." 
They will be forthcoming very shortly. 
Those at work have got the run of the 
mines now, and are busily howking them 
up. A trawler-skipper wishes to speak to 
the Office. "They" have ordered him out, 
but his boiler, most of it, is on the quay at 
the present time, and "ye'll remember, it's 
the same wi' my foremast an' port rigging, 
sir." The Office does not precisely remem- 
ber, but if boiler and foremast are on the 
quay the rest of the ship had better stay 
alongside. The skipper falls away relieved. 
(He scraped a tramp a few nights ago in a 
bit of a sea.) There is a little mutter of gun- 



THE FRINGES OF THE FLEET 25 

fire somewhere across the grey water where 
a fleet is at work. A monitor as broad as 
she is long comes back from wherever the 
trouble is, slips through the harbour mouth, 
all wreathed with signals, is received by two 
motherly lighters, and, to all appearance, 
goes to sleep between them. The Office 
does not even look up; for that is not in 
their department. They have found a 
trawler to replace the boilerless one. Her 
name is slid into the rack. The immoral 
torpedo-boat flounces back to her moorings. 
Evidently what Elizabeth Huggins said 
was not evidence. The messages and re- 
plies begin again as the day closes. 

The Night Patrol 

Return now to the inner harbour. At 
twilight there was a stir among the packed 
craft like the separation of dried tea-leaves 
in water. The swing-bridge across the 
basin shut against us. A boat shot out 
of the jam, took the narrow exit at a fair 
seven knots and rounded in the outer 



26 SEA WARFARE 

harbour with all the pomp of a flagship, 
which was exactly what she was. Others 
followed, breaking away from every quarter 
in silence. Boat after boat fell into line — 
gear stowed away, spars and buoys in order 
on their clean decks, guns cast loose and 
ready, wheel-house windows darkened, and 
everything in order for a day or a week or 
a month out. There was no word anywhere. 
The interrupted foot-traffic stared at them 
as they slid past below. A woman beside 
me waved her hand to a man on one of them, 
and I saw his face light as he waved back. 
The boat where they had demonstrated for 
me with matches was the last. Her skipper 
hadn't thought it worth while to tell me 
that he was going that evening. Then the 
line straightened up and stood out to sea. 

"You never said this was going to 
happen," I said reproachfully to my A.B. 

"No more I did," said he. "It's the 
night-patrol going out. Fact is, I'm 
so used to the bloomin' evolution that 
it never struck me to mention it as you 
might say." 



THE FRINGES OF THE FLEET 27 

Next morning I was at service in a man- 
of-war, and even as we came to the prayer 
that the Navy might "be a safeguard to 
such as pass upon the sea on their lawful 
occasions," I saw the long procession of 
traffic resuming up and down the Channel 
— six ships to the hour. It has been hung 
up for a bit, they said. 



Farewell and adieu to you, Greenwich ladies, 

Farewell and adieu to you, ladies ashore ! 

For we've received orders to work to the east- 
ward 

Where we hope in a short time to strafe 'em 
some more. 

We'll duck and we'll dive like little tin turtles, 

We'll duck and we'll dive underneath the 
North Seas, 

Until we strike something that doesn't ex- 
pect us, 

From here to Cuxhaven it's go as you please ! 

The first thing we did was to dock in a mine- 
field, 

Which isn't a place where repairs should be 
done; 

29 



30 SEA WARFARE 

And there we lay doggo in twelve-fathom 

water 
With tri-nitro-toluol hogging our run. 

The next thing we did, we rose under a 

Zeppelin, 
With his shiny big belly half blocking the 

shy. 
But what in the — Heavens can you do with 

six-pounders ? 
So we fired what we had and we bade him 

good-bye. 



SUBMARINES 



The chief business of the Trawler Fleet is 
to attend to the traffic. The submarine in 
her sphere attends to the enemy. Like the 
destroyer, the submarine has created its 
own type of officer and man — with language 
and traditions apart from the rest of the 
Service, and yet at heart unchangingly 
of the Service. Their business is to run 
monstrous risks from earth, air, and water, 
in what, to be of any use, must be the 
coldest of cold blood. 

The commander's is more a one-man 
job, as the crew's is more team-work, than 
any other employment afloat. That is why 
the relations between submarine officers 
and men are what they are. They play 

31 



32 SEA WARFARE 

hourly for each other's lives with Death the 
Umpire always at their elbow on tiptoe to 
give them "out." 

There is a stretch of water, once dear 
to amateur yachtsmen, now given over 
to scouts, submarines, destroyers, and, of 
course, contingents of trawlers. We were 
waiting the return of some boats which 
were due to report. A couple surged up 
the still harbour in the afternoon light and 
tied up beside their sisters. There climbed 
out of them three or four high-booted, 
sunken-eyed pirates clad in sweaters, under 
jackets that a stoker of the last generation 
would have disowned. This was their first 
chance to compare notes at close hand. 
Together they lamented the loss of a 
Zeppelin — "a perfect mug of a Zepp," 
who had come down very low and offered 
one of them a sitting shot. "But what 
can you do with our guns? I gave him 
what I had, and then he started bombing." 

"I know he did," another said. "I heard 
him. That's what brought me down to 
you. I thought he had you that last time." 



THE FRINGES OF THE FLEET 33 

"No, I was forty foot under when he 
hove out the big un. What happened to 
you f" 

"My steering-gear jammed just after 
I went down, and I had to go round in 
circles till I got it straightened out. But 
wasnt he a mug!" 

"Was he the brute with the patch on his 
port side?" a sister-boat demanded. 

" No ! This fellow had just been hatched. 
He was almost sitting on the water, heaving 
bombs over." 

"And my blasted steering-gear went and 
chose then to go wrong," the other com- 
mander mourned. "I thought his last little 
egg was going to get me!" 

Half an hour later, I was formally intro- 
duced to three or four quite strange, quite 
immaculate officers, freshly shaved, and a 
little tired about the eyes, whom I thought 
I had met before. 

Labour and Refreshment 

Meantime (it was on the hour of evening 
drinks) one of the boats was still unaccounted 



34 SEA WARFARE 

for. No one talked of her. They rather 
discussed motor-cars and Admiralty con- 
structors, but — it felt like that queer twi- 
light watch at the front when the homing 
aeroplanes drop in. Presently a signaller 
entered: "V 42 outside, sir; wants to know 
which channel she shall use." "Oh, thank 
you. Tell her to take so-and-so." . . . 
Mine, I remember, was vermouth and bit- 
ters, and later on V 42 himself found a soft 
chair and joined the committee of instruc- 
tion. Those next for duty, as well as those in 
training, wished to hear what was going on, 
and who had shifted what to where, and 
how certain arrangements had worked. They 
were told in language not to be found in 
any printable book. Questions and answers 
were alike Hebrew to one listener, but he 
gathered that every boat carried a second in 
command — a strong, persevering youth, who 
seemed responsible for everything that went 
wrong, from a motor cylinder to a torpedo. 
Then somebody touched on the mercantile 
marine and its habits. 

Said one philosopher: "They can't be 



THE FRINGES OF THE FLEET 35 

expected to take any more risks than they 
do. I wouldn't, if I was a skipper. I'd 
loose off at any blessed periscope I saw." 

"That's all very fine. You wait till 
you've had a patriotic tramp trying to strafe 
you at your own back-door," said another. 

Some one told a tale of a man with a 
voice, notable even in a Service where men 
are not trained to whisper. He was coming 
back, empty-handed, dirty, tired, and best 
left alone. From the peace of the German 
side he had entered our hectic home-waters, 
where the usual tramp shelled, and by 
miraculous luck, crumpled his periscope. 
Another man might have dived, but Boaner- 
ges kept on rising. Majestic and wrathful 
he Tose personally through his main hatch, 
and at 2000 yards (have I said it was a still 
day?) addressed the tramp. Even at that 
distance she gathered it was a Naval officer 
with a grievance, and by the time he ran 
alongside she was in a state of coma, but 
managed to stammer: "Well, sir, at least 
you'll admit that our shooting was pretty 
good." 



36 SEA WARFARE 

"And that," said my informant, "put the 
lid on!" Boanerges went down lest he 
should be tempted to murder; and the tramp 
affirms she heard him rumbling beneath her, 
like an inverted thunder-storm, for fifteen 
minutes. 

"All those tramps ought to be disarmed, 
and we ought to have all their guns," said a 
voice out of a corner. 

"What? Still worrying over your 'mug'?" 
some one replied. 

"He was a mug!" went on the man of 
one idea. "If I'd had a couple of twelves 
even, I could have strafed him proper. I 
don't know whether I shall mutiny, or de- 
sert, or write to the First Sea Lord about it." 

"Strafe all Admiralty constructors to 
begin with. 7 could build a better boat 
with a 4-inch lathe and a sardine-tin than 

," the speaker named her by letter and 

number. 

"That's pure jealousy," her commander 
explained to the company. "Ever since I 
installed — ahem ! — my patent electric wash- 
basin he's been intriguin' to get her. Why? 



THE FRINGES OF THE FLEET 37 

We know he doesn't wash. He'd only use 
the basin to keep beer in." 



Underwater Works 

However often one meets it, as in this 
war one meets it at every turn, one never 
gets used to the Holy Spirit of Man at his 
job. The "common sweeper," growling 
over his mug of tea that there was "nothing 
in sweepin'," and these idly chaffing men, 
new shaved and attired, from the gates of 
Death which had let them through for the 
fiftieth time, were all of the same fabric — 
incomprehensible, I should imagine, to the 
enemy. And the stuff held good through- 
out all the world — from the Dardanelles to 
the Baltic, where only a little while ago 
another batch of submarines had slipped in 
and begun to be busy. I had spent some of 
the afternoon in looking through reports of 
submarine work in the Sea of Marmora. 
They read like the diary of energetic weasels 
in an overcrowded chicken-run, and the 
results for each boat were tabulated some- 



38 SEA WARFARE 

thing like a cricket score. There were no 
maiden overs. One came across jewels of 
price set in the flat official phraseology. 
For example, one man who was describing 
some steps he was taking to remedy certain 
defects, interjected casually: "At this point 
I had to go under for a little, as a man in a 
boat was trying to grab my periscope with 
his hand." No reference before or after to 
the said man or his fate. Again: "Came 
across a dhow with a Turkish skipper. He 
seemed so miserable that I let him go." 
And elsewhere in those waters, a submarine 
overhauled a steamer full of Turkish pas- 
sengers, some of whom, arguing on their 
allies' lines, promptly leaped overboard. Our 
boat fished them out and returned them, for 
she was not killing civilians. In another 
affair, which included several ships (now 
at the bottom) and one submarine, the 
commander relaxes enough to note that: 
"The men behaved very well under direct 
and flanking fire from rifles at about fifteen 
yards." This was not, I believe, the sub- 
marine that fought the Turkish cavalry on 



THE FRINGES OF THE FLEET 39 

the beach. And in addition to matters 
much more marvellous than any I have 
hinted at, the reports deal with repairs and 
shifts and contrivances carried through in 
the face of dangers that read like the last 
delirium of romance. One boat went down 
the Straits and found herself rather canted 
over to one side. A mine and chain had 
jammed under her forward diving-plane. So 
far as I made out, she shook it off by stand- 
ing on her head and jerking backwards; or 
it may have been, for the thing has occurred 
more than once, she merely rose as much as 
she could, when she could, and then "re- 
leased it by hand," as the official phrase goes. 

Four Nightmares 

And who, a few months ago, could have 
invented, or having invented, would have 
dared to print such a nightmare as this: 
There was a boat in the North Sea who ran 
into a net and was caught by the nose. She 
rose, still entangled, meaning to cut the 
thing away on the surface. But a Zeppelin 



40 SEA WARFARE 

in waiting saw and bombed her, and she 
had to go down again at once — but not 
too wildly or she would get herself more 
wrapped up than ever. She went down, 
and by slow working and weaving and 
wriggling, guided only by guesses at the 
meaning of each scrape and grind of the net 
on her blind forehead, at last she drew clear. 
Then she sat on the bottom and thought. 
The question was whether she should go 
back at once and warn her confederates 
against the trap, or wait till the destroyers 
which she knew the Zeppelin would have 
signalled for, should come out to finish her 
still entangled, as they would suppose, in 
the net? It was a simple calculation of 
comparative speeds and positions, and when 
it was worked out she decided to try for 
the double event. Within a few minutes 
of the time she had allowed for them, she 
heard the twitter of four destroyers' screws 
quartering above her; rose; got her shot 
in; saw one destroyer crumple; hung round 
till another took the wreck in tow; said 
good-bye to the spare brace (she was 



THE FRINGES OF THE FLEET 41 

at the end of her supplies), and reached the 
rendezvous in time to turn her friends. 

And since we are dealing in nightmares, 
here are two more — one genuine, the other, 
mercifully, false. There was a boat not 
only at, but in the mouth of a river — well 
home in German territory. She was spotted, 
and went under, her commander per- 
fectly aware that there was not more than 
five feet of water over her conning-tower, 
so that even a torpedo-boat, let alone 
a destroyer, would hit it if she came over. 
But nothing hit anything. The search 
was conducted on scientific principles while 
they sat on the silt and suffered. Then the 
commander heard the rasp of a wire trawl 
sweeping over his hull. It was not a nice 
sound, but there happened to be a couple 
of gramophones aboard, and he turned 
them both on to drown it. And in due 
time that boat got home with everybody's 
hair of just the same colour as when they 
had started! 

The other nightmare arose out of silence 
and imagination. A boat had gone to bed 



42 SEA WARFARE 

on the bottom in a spot where she might 
reasonably expect to be looked for, but it 
was a convenient jumping-off, or up, place 
for the work in hand. About the bad hour 
of 2 :30 a. m. the commander was waked by 
one of his men, who whispered to him: 
"They've got the chains on us, sir!" 
Whether it was pure nightmare, an hal- 
lucination of long wakefulness, something 
relaxing and releasing in that packed box 
of machinery, or the disgustful reality, the 
commander could not tell, but it had all the 
makings of panic in it. So the Lord and 
long training put it into his head to reply! 
"Have they? Well, we shan't be coming 
up till nine o'clock this morning. We'll 
see about it then. Turn out that light, 
please." 

He did not sleep, but the dreamer and 
the others did, and when morning came and 
he gave the order to rise, and she rose un- 
hampered, and he saw the grey, smeared 
seas from above once again, he said it was 
a very refreshing sight. 

Lastly, which is on all fours with the 



THE FRINGES OF THE FLEET 43 

gamble of the chase, a man was coming 
home rather bored after an uneventful trip. 
It was necessary for him to sit on the 
bottom for awhile, and there be played 
patience. Of a sudden it struck him, as 
a vow and an omen, that if he worked out 
the next game correctly he would go up 
and strafe something. The cards fell all 
in order. He went up at once and found 
himself alongside a German, whom, as he 
had promised and prophesied to himself, 
he destroyed. She was a mine-layer, and 
needed only a jar to dissipate like a cracked 
electric-light bulb. He was somewhat im- 
pressed by the contrast between the single- 
handed game fifty feet below, the ascent, 
the attack, the amazing result, and when 
he descended again, his cards just as he had 
left them. 



The ships destroy us above 

And ensnare us beneath. 
We arise, we lie down, and we move 

In the belly of Death. 

The ships have a thousand eyes 
To mark zvhere we come . 

And the mirth of a seaport dies 
When our blow gets home. 



45 



SUBMARINES 

II 

I was honoured by a glimpse into this veiled 
life in a boat which was merely practising 
between trips. Submarines are like cats. 
They never tell "who they were with last 
night," and they sleep as much as they can. 
If you board a submarine off duty you 
generally see a perspective of fore-shortened 
fattish men laid all along. The men say 
that except at certain times it is rather an 
easy life, with relaxed regulations about 
smoking, calculated to make a man put on 
flesh. One requires well-padded nerves. 
Many of the men do not appear on deck 
throughout the whole trip. After all, why 
should they if they don't want to? They 
know that they are responsible in their 

47 



48 SEA WARFARE 

department for their comrades' lives as their 
comrades are responsible for theirs. What's 
the use of flapping about? Better lay in 
some magazines and cigarettes. 

When we set forth there had been some 
trouble in the fairway, and a mined neutral, 
whose misfortune all bore with exemplary 
calm, was careened on a near-by shoal. 

"Suppose there are more mines knocking 
about?" I suggested. 

"We'll hope there aren't," was the sooth- 
ing reply. " Mines are all Joss. You either 
hit 'em or you don't. And if you do, 
they don't always go off. They scrape 
alongside." 

"What's the etiquette then?" 

"Shut off both propellers and hope." 

We were dodging various craft down the 
harbour when a squadron of trawlers came 
out on our beam, at that extravagant rate 
of speed which unlimited Government coal 
always leads to. They were led by an 
ugly, upstanding, black-sided buccaneer 
with twelve-pounders. 

"Ah! That's the King of the Trawlers. 



THE FRINGES OF THE FLEET 49 

Isn't he carrying dog, too! Give him 
room!" one said. 

We were all in the narrowed harbour 
mouth together. 

" 'There's my youngest daughter. Take 
a look at her!'" some one hummed as a 
punctilious navy cap slid by on a very near 
bridge. 

"We'll fall in behind him. They're going 
over to the neutral. Then they'll sweep. 
By the bye, did you hear about one of the 
passengers in the neutral yesterday? He was 
taken off, of course, by a destroyer, and the 
only thing he said was: 'Twenty-five time 
I 'ave insured, but not this time. . . . 
'Angit!'" 

The trawlers lunged ahead toward the 
forlorn neutral. Our destroyer nipped past 
us with that high-shouldered, terrier-like 
pouncing action of the newer boats, and 
went ahead. A tramp in ballast, her pro- 
peller half out of water, threshed along 
through the sallow haze. 

"Lord! What a shot!" somebody said 
enviously. The men on the little deck 



50 SEA WARFARE 

looked across at the slow-moving silhouette. 
One of them, a cigarette behind his ear, 
smiled at a companion. 

Then we went down — not as they go 
when they are pressed (the record, I believe, 
is 50 feet in 50 seconds from top to bottom), 
but genteelly, to an orchestra of appropriate 
sounds, roarings, and blowings, and after the 
orders, which come from the commander 
alone, utter silence and peace. 

"There's the bottom. We bumped at 
fifty — fifty-two," he said. 

"I didn't feel it." 

"We'll try again. Watch the gauge, 
and you'll see it flick a little." 

The Practice of the Art 

It may have been so, but I was more 
interested in the faces, and above all the 
eyes, all down the length of her. It was to 
them, of course, the simplest of manoeuvres. 
They dropped into gear as no machine could ; 
but the training of years and the experience 
of the year leaped up behind those steady 



THE FRINGES OF THE FLEET 51 

eyes under the electrics in the shadow of 
the tall motors, between the pipes and the 
curved hull, or glued to their special gauges. 
One forgot the bodies altogether — but one 
will never forget the eyes or the ennobled 
faces. One man I remember in particular. 
On deck his was no more than a grave, 
rather striking countenance, cast in the un- 
mistakable petty officer's mould. Below, as 
I saw him in profile handling a vital control, 
he looked like the Doge of Venice, the 
Prior of some sternly-ruled monastic order, 
an old-time Pope — anything that signifies 
trained and stored intellectual power utterly 
and ascetically devoted to some vast im- 
personal end. And so with a much younger 
man, who changed into such a monk as 
Frank Dicksee used to draw. Only a couple 
of torpedo-men, not being in gear for the 
moment, read an illustrated paper. Their 
time did not come till we went up and got 
to business, which meant firing at our 
destroyer, and, I think, keeping out of the 
light of a friend's torpedoes. 

The attack and everything connected with 



52 SEA WARFARE 

it is solely the commander's affair. He is 
the only one who gets any fun at all — since 
he is the eye, the brain, and the hand of the 
whole — this single figure at the periscope. 
The second in command heaves sighs, and 
prays that the dummy torpedo (there is less 
trouble about the live ones) will go off all 
right, or he'll be told about it. The others 
wait and follow the quick run of orders. It 
is, if not a convention, a fairly established 
custom that the commander shall inferenti- 
ally give his world some idea of what is 
going on. At least, I only heard of one 
man who says nothing whatever, and doesn't 
even wriggle his shoulders when he is on 
the sight. The others soliloquise, etc., 
according to their temperament; and the 
periscope is as revealing as golf. 

Submarines nowadays are expected to 
look out for themselves more than at the 
old practices, when the destroyers walked 
circumspectly. We dived and circulated 
under water for a while, and then rose for a 
sight — something like this: "Up a little — 
up! Up still! Where the deuce has he 



THE FRINGES OF THE FLEET 53 

got to — Ah! (Half a dozen orders as to 
helm and depth of descent, and a pause 
broken by a drumming noise somewhere 
above, which increases and passes away.) 
That's better! Up again! (This refers to 
the periscope.) Yes. Ah! No, we dont 
think! All right! Keep her down, damn 
it! Umm! That ought to be nineteen 
knots. . . . Dirty trick! He's changing 
speed. No, he isn't. He's all right. Ready 
forward there ! (A valve sputters and drips, 
the torpedo-men crouch over their tubes and 
nod to themselves. Their faces have 

changed now.) He hasn't spotted us yet. 
We'll ju-ust — (more helm and depth orders, 
but specially helm) — 'Wish we were working 
a beam-tube. Ne'er mind! Up! (A last 
string of orders.) Six hundred, and he 
doesn't see us! Fire!" 

The dummy left; the second in command 
cocked one ear and looked relieved. Up we 
rose; the wet air and spray spattered through 
the hatch; the destroyer swung off to re- 
trieve the dummy. 

"Careless brutes destroyers are," said one 



54 SEA WARFARE 

officer. "That fellow nearly walked over 
us just now. Did you notice?" 

The commander was playing his game out 
over again — stroke by stroke. "With a 
beam-tube I'd ha' strafed him amidships," 
he concluded. 

"Why didn't you then?" I asked. 

There were loads of shiny reasons, which 
reminded me that we were at war and 
cleared for action, and that the interlude 
had been merely play. A companion rose 
alongside and wanted to know whether we 
had seen anything of her dummy. 

"No. But we heard it," was the short 
answer. 

I was rather annoyed, because I had seen 
that particular daughter of destruction on 
the stocks only a short time ago, and here 
she was grown up and talking about her 
missing children! 

In the harbour again, one found more 
submarines, all patterns and makes and 
sizes, with rumours of yet more and larger to 
follow. Naturally their men say that we 
are only at the beginning of the submarine. 



THE FRINGES OF THE FLEET 55 

We shall have them presently for all 
purposes. 

The Man and the Work 

Now here is a mystery of the Service. 
A man gets a boat which for two years 
becomes his very self — 

His morning hope, his evening dream, 
His joy throughout the day. 

With him is a second in command, an 
engineer, and some others. They prove 
each other's souls habitually every few days, 
by the direct test of peril, till they act, 
think, and endure as a unit, in and with the 
boat. That commander is transferred to 
another boat. He tries to take with him if 
he can, which he can't, as many of his other 
selves as possible. He is pitched into a new 
type twice the size of the old one, with three 
times as many gadgets, an unexplored tem- 
perament and unknown leanings. After his 
first trip he comes back clamouring for the 
head of her constructor, of his own second 
in command, his engineer, his cox, and a few 



56 SEA WARFARE 

other ratings. They for their part wish him 
dead on the beach, because, last commission 
with So-and-so, nothing ever went wrong 
anywhere. A fortnight later you can remind 
the commander of what he said, and he will 
deny every word of it. She's not, he says, 
so very vile — things considered — barring her 
five-ton torpedo-derricks, the abominations 
of her wireless, and the tropical temperature 
of her beer-lockers. All of which signifies 
that the new boat has found her soul, and 
her commander would not change her for 
battle-cruisers. Therefore, that he may re- 
member he is the Service and not a branch 
of it, he is after certain seasons shifted to a 
battle-cruiser, where he lives in a blaze of 
admirals and aiguillettes, responsible for 
vast decks and crypt-like flats, a student of 
extended above-water tactics, thinking in 
tens of thousands of yards instead of his 
modest but deadly three to twelve hundred. 
And the man who takes his place straight- 
way forgets that he ever looked down on 
great rollers from a sixty -foot bridge under 
the whole breadth of heaven, but crawls and 



THE FRINGES OF THE FLEET 57 

climbs and dives through conning-towers 
with those same waves wet in his neck, and 
when the cruisers pass him, tearing the deep 
open in half a gale, thanks God he is not 
as they are, and goes to bed beneath their 
distracted keels. 



Expert Opinions 

"But submarine work is cold-blooded 
business." 

(This was at a little session in a green- 
curtained "wardroom" cum owner's cabin.) 

"Then there's no truth in the yarn that 
you can feel when the torpedo's going to 
get home?" I asked. 

"Not a word. You sometimes see it 
get home, or miss, as the case may be. Of 
course, it's never your fault if it misses. 
It's all your second in command." 

"That's true, too," said the second. "I 
catch it all round. That's what I am here for." 

"And what about the third man?" 
There was one aboard at the time. 

"He generally comes from a smaller 



58 SEA WARFARE 

boat, to pick up real work — if he can sup- 
press his intellect and doesn't talk 'last 
commission. 

The third hand promptly denied the 
possession of any intellect, and was quite 
dumb about his last boat. 

"And the men?" 

"They train on, too. They train each 
other. Yes, one gets to know 'em about as 
well as they get to know us. Up topside, 
a man can take you in — take himself in — 
for months; for half a commission, p'rhaps. 
Down below he can't. It's all in cold blood 
— not like at the front, where they have 
something exciting all the time." 

"Then bumping mines isn't exciting?" 

"Not one little bit. You can't bump 
back at 'em. Even with a Zepp " 

"Oh, now and then," one interrupted, 
and they laughed as they explained. 

"Yes, that was rather funny. One of 
our boats came up slap underneath a low 
Zepp. 'Looked for the sky, you know, 
and couldn't see anything except this fat, 
shining belly almost on top of 'em. Luckily, 



THE FRINGES OF THE FLEET 59 

it wasn't the Zepp's stingin' end. So our 
boat went to windward and kept just awash. 
There was a bit of a sea, and the Zepp had 
to work against the wind. (They don't like 
that.) Our boat sent a man to the gun. 
He was pretty well drowned, of course, but 
he hung on, choking and spitting, and held 
his breath, and got in shots where he could. 
This Zepp was strafing bombs about for 
all she was worth, and — who was it? — 
Macartney, I think, potting at her between 
dives; and naturally all hands wanted to 
look at the performance, so about half the 
North Sea flopped down below and — oh, 
they had a Charlie Chaplin time of it! 
Well, somehow, Macartney managed to rip 
the Zepp a bit, and she went to leeward 
with a list on her. We saw her a fortnight 
later with a patch on her port side. Oh, if 
Fritz only fought clean, this wouldn't be half 
a bad show. But Fritz can't fight clean." 

"And we can't do what he does — even 
if we were allowed to," one said. 

"No, we can't. 'Tisn't done. We have 
to fish Fritz out of the water, dry him, and 



60 SEA WARFARE 

give him cocktails, and send him to Don- 
nington Hall." 

"And what does Fritz do?" I asked. 

"He sputters and clicks and bows. He 
has all the correct motions, you know; but, 
of course, when he's your prisoner you can't 
tell him what he really is." 

"And do you suppose Fritz understands 
any of it?" I went on. 

"No. Or he wouldn't have lusitaniaed. 
This war was his first chance of making his 
name, and he chucked it all away for the 
sake of showin' off as a foul Gottstrafer." 

And they talked of that hour of the 
night when submarines come to the top like 
mermaids to get and give information; of 
boats whose business it is to fire as much 
and to splash about as aggressively as 
possible; and of other boats who avoid any 
sort of display — dumb boats watching and 
relieving watch, with their periscope just 
showing like a crocodile's eye, at the back 
of islands and the mouths of channels where 
something may some day move out in pro- 
cession to its doom. 



BE well assured that on our side 

Our challenged oceans fight, 
Though headlong wind and heaping tide 

Make us their sport to-night. 
Through force of weather, not of war, 

In jeopardy we steer. 
Then, welcome Fate's discourtesy 
Whereby it shall appear 
How in all time of our distress 
As in our triumph too, 
The game is more than tlie player of the 

game, 
And the ship is more than the crew I 

Be well assured, though wave and wind 

Have mightier blows in store, 
That we who keep the watch assigned 

Must stand to it the more; 
And as our streaming bows dismiss 

Each billow's baulked career, 

61 



62 SEA WARFARE 

Sing, welcome Fate's discourtesy 
Whereby it is made clear 

How in all time of our distress 

As in our triumph too, 

The game is more than the player of the 

game, 
And the ship is more than the crew I 

Be well assured, though in our power 

Is nothing left to give 
But time and place to meet the hour 

And leave to strive to live, 
Till these dissolve our Order holds, 

Our Service binds us here. 
Then, welcome Fate's discourtesy 
Whereby it is made clear 
How in all time of our distress 
And our deliverance too, 
The game is more than the player of the 

game, 
And the ship is more than the crew ! 



PATROLS 



On the edge of the North Sea sits an 
Admiral in charge of a stretch of coast 
without lights or marks, along which the 
traffic moves much as usual. In front of 
him there is nothing but the east wind, the 
enemy and some few of our ships. Behind 
him there are towns, with M.P.'s attached, 
who a little while ago didn't see the reason 
for certain lighting orders. When a Zep- 
pelin or two came, they saw. Left and 
right of him are enormous docks, with vast 
crowded sheds, miles of stone-faced quay- 
edges, loaded with all manner of supplies 
and crowded with mixed shipping. 

In this exalted world one met staff- 
captains, staff-commanders, staff-lieuten- 

63 



64 SEA WARFARE 

ants, and secretaries, with paymasters so 
senior that they almost ranked with ad- 
mirals. There were warrant officers, too, 
who long ago gave up splashing about decks 
barefoot, and now check and issue stores 
to the ravenous, untruthful fleets. Said 
one of these, guarding a collection of 
desirable things, to a cross between a sick- 
bay attendant and a junior writer (but he 
was really an expert burglar), "No! An' 
you can tell Mr. So-and-so, with my com- 
pliments, that the storekeeper's gone away 
— right away — with the key of these stores 
in his pocket. Understand me? In his 
trousers pocket." 

He snorted at my next question. 

"Do I know any destroyer-lootenants?" 
said he. "This coast's rank with 'em! 
Destroyer-lootenants are born stealing. It's 
a mercy they's too busy to practise forgery, 
or I'd be in gaol. Engineer-commanders? 
Engineer-lootenants? They 're worse ! . . . 
Look here ! If my own mother was to come 
to me beggin' brass screws for her own 
coffin, I'd — I'd think twice before I'd 



THE FRINGES OF THE FLEET 65 

oblige the old lady. War's war, I grant 
you that; but what I've got to contend 
with is crime." 

I referred to him a case of conscience in 
which every one concerned acted exactly 
as he should, and it nearly ended in murder. 
During a lengthy action, the working of a 
gun was hampered by some empty cartridge- 
cases which the lieutenant in charge made 
signs (no man could hear his neighbour 
speak just then) should be hove overboard. 
Upon which the gunner rushed forward 
and made other signs that they were "on 
charge," and must be tallied and accounted 
for. He, too, was trained in a strict school. 
Upon which the lieutenant, but that he 
was busy, would have slain the gunner for 
refusing orders in action. Afterwards he 
wanted him shot by court-martial. But 
every one was voiceless by then, and could 
only mouth and croak at each other, till 
somebody laughed, and the pedantic gunner 
was spared. 

"Well, that's what you might fairly 
call a naval crux," said my friend among 



66 SEA WARFARE 

the stores. "The lootenant was right. 
'Mustn't refuse orders in action. The 
gunner was right. Empty cases are on 
charge. No one ought to chuck 'em away 
that way, but . . . Damn it, they were 
all of 'em right! It ought to ha' been a 
marine. Then they could have killed him 
and preserved discipline at the same time." 

A Little Theory 

The problem of this coast resolves itself 
into keeping touch with the enemy's move- 
ments; in preparing matters to trap and 
hinder him when he moves, and in so 
entertaining him that he shall not have 
time to draw clear before a blow descends 
on him from another quarter. There are 
then three lines of defence: the outer, the 
inner, and the home waters. The traffic 
and fishing are always with us. 

The blackboard idea of it is always to 
have stronger forces more immediately 
available everywhere than those the enemy 
can send, x German submarines draw a 



THE FRINGES OF THE FLEET 67 

English destroyers. Then x calls x + y to 
deal with a, who, in turn, calls up 6, a scout, 
and possibly a 8 , with a fair chance that, if 
x + y + z (a Zeppelin) carry on, they will 
run into a 3 -f 6 2 + c cruisers. At this point, 
the equation generally stops; if it continued 
it would end mathematically in the whole 
of the German Fleet coming out. Then 
another factor which we may call the Grand 
Fleet would come from another place. To 
change the comparisons: the Grand Fleet 
is the "strong left" ready to give the 
knock-out blow on the point of the chin 
when the head is thrown up. The other 
fleets and other arrangements threaten the 
enemy's solar plexus and stomach. Some- 
where in relation to the Grand Fleet lies 
the "blockading" cordon which examines 
neutral traffic. It could be drawn as tight 
as a Turkish bowstring, but for reasons 
which we may arrive at after the war, it 
does not seem to have been so drawn up 
to date. 

The enemy lies behind his mines, and 
ours, raids our coasts when he sees a chance, 



68 SEA WARFARE 

and kills seagoing civilians at sight or guess, 
with intent to terrify. Most sailor-men are 
mixed up with a woman or two; a fair 
percentage of them have seen men drown. 
They can realise what it is when women 
go down choking in horrible tangles and 
heavings of draperies. To say that the 
enemy has cut himself from the fellowship 
of all who use the seas is rather understating 
the case. As a man observed thoughtfully: 
"You can't look at any water now without 
seeing 'Lusitania' sprawlin' all across it. 
And just think of those words, 'North- 
German Lloyd,' ' Hamburg- Amerika ' and 
such things, in the time to come. They 
simply mustn't be." 

He was an elderly trawler, respectable 
as they make them, who, after many years 
of fishing, had discovered his real vocation. 
"I never thought I'd like killin' men," he 
reflected. "Never seemed to be any o' my 
dooty. But it is — and I do!" 

A great deal of the East Coast work 
concerns mine-fields — ours and the enemy's 
— both of which shift as occasion requires. 



THE FRINGES OF THE FLEET 69 

We search for and root out the enemy's 
mines; they do the like by us. It is a 
perpetual game of finding, springing, and 
laying traps on the least as well as the most 
likely runways that ships use — such sea 
snaring and wiring as the world never 
dreamt of. We are hampered in this, 
because our Navy respects neutrals; and 
spends a great deal of its time in making 
their path safe for them. The enemy does 
not. He blows them up, because that cows 
and impresses them, and so adds to his 
prestige. 

Death and the Destroyer 

The easiest way of finding a mine-field 
is to steam into it, on the edge of night for 
choice, with a steep sea running, for that 
brings the bows down like a chopper on 
the detonator-horns. Some boats have 
enjoyed this experience and still live. There 
was one destroyer (and there may have 
been others since) who came through twenty 
four hours of highly compressed life. She 



70 SEA WARFARE 

had an idea that there was a mine-field 
somewhere about, and left her companions 
behind while she explored. The weather 
was dead calm, and she walked delicately. 
She saw one Scandinavian steamer blow up 
a couple of miles away, rescued the skipper 
and some hands; saw another neutral, which 
she could not reach till all was over, skied 
in another direction; and, between her life- 
saving efforts and her natural curiosity, got 
herself as thoroughly mixed up with the 
field as a camel among tent-ropes. A 
destroyer's bows are very fine, and her sides 
are very straight. This causes her to cleave 
the wave with the minimum of disturbance, 
and this boat had no desire to cleave any- 
thing else. None the less, from time to 
time, she heard a mine grate, or tinkle, or 
jar (I could not arrive at the precise note it 
strikes, but they say it is unpleasant) on 
her plates. Sometimes she would be free 
of them for a long while, and began to 
hope she was clear. At other times they 
were numerous, but when at last she seemed 
to have worried out of the danger zone, 



THE FRINGES OF THE FLEET 71 

lieutenant and sub together left the bridge 
for a cup of tea. ("In those days we took 
mines very seriously, you know.") As they 
were in act to drink, they heard the hateful 
sound again just outside the wardroom. 
Both put their cups down with extreme 
care, little fingers extended ("We felt as 
if they might blow up, too"), and tip-toed 
on deck, where they met the foc'sle also on 
tip-toe. They pulled themselves together, 
and asked severely what the foc'sle thought 
it was doing. "Beg pardon, sir, but there's 
another of those blighters tap-tapping along- 
side, our end." They all waited and lis- 
tened to their common coffin being nailed 
by Death himself. But the things bumped 
away. At this point they thought it only 
decent to invite the rescued skipper, warm 
and blanketed in one of their bunks, to step 
up and do any further perishing in the open. 

"No, thank you," said he. "Last time 
I was blown up in my bunk, too. That 
was all right. So I think, now, too, I stay 
in my bunk here. It is cold upstairs." 

Somehow or other they got out of the 



72 SEA WARFARE 

mess after all. "Yes, we used to take 
mines awfully seriously in those days. One 
comfort is, Fritz'll take them seriously when 
he comes out. Fritz don't like mines." 

"Who does?" I wanted to know. 

"If you'd been here a little while ago, 
you'd seen a commander comin' in with a 
big 'un slung under his counter. He 
brought the beastly thing in to analyse. 
The rest of his squadron followed at two- 
knot intervals, and everything in harbour 
that had steam up scattered." 

The Admirable Commander 

Presently I had the honour to meet 
a lieutenant-commander-admiral who had 
retired from the service, but, like others, 
had turned out again at the first flash of 
the guns, and now commands — he who had 
great ships erupting at his least signal — a 
squadron of trawlers for the protection of the 
Dogger Bank Fleet. At present prices — let 
alone the chance of the paying submarine 
— men would fish in much warmer places. 



THE FRINGES OF THE FLEET 73 

His flagship was once a multi-millionaire's 
private yacht. In her mixture of stark, 
carpetless, curtainless, carbolised present, 
with voluptuously curved, broad-decked, 
easy-stairway ed past, she might be Queen 
Guinevere in the convent at Amesbury. 
And her lieutenant-commander, most 
careful to pay all due compliments to 
admirals who were midshipmen when he 
was a commander, leads a congregation of 
very hard men indeed. They do precisely 
what he tells them to, and with him go 
through strange experiences, because they 
love him and because his language is 
volcanic and wonderful — what you might 
call Popocatapocalyptic. I saw the Old 
Navy making ready to lead out the New 
under a grey sky and a falling glass — the 
wisdom and cunning of the old man backed 
up by the passion and power of the younger 
breed, and the discipline which had been 
his soul for half a century binding them all. 

"What'll he do this time?" I asked of 
one who might know. 

"He'll cruise between Two and Three 



74 SEA WARFARE 

East; but if you'll tell me what he wont 
do, it 'ud be more to the point! He's mine- 
hunting, I expect, just now." 



Wasted Material 

Here is a digression suggested by the 
sight of a man I had known in other scenes, 
despatch-riding round a fleet in a petrol- 
launch. There are many of his type, 
yachtsmen of sorts accustomed to take 
chances, who do not hold masters' certifi- 
cates and cannot be given sea-going com- 
mands. Like my friend, they do general 
utility work — often in their own boats. 
This is a waste of good material. Nobody 
wants amateur navigators — the traffic lanes 
are none too wide as it is. But these 
gentlemen ought to be distributed among 
the Trawler Fleet as strictly combatant 
officers. A trawler skipper may be an 
excellent seaman, but slow with a submarine 
shelling and diving, or in cutting out enemy 
trawlers. The young ones who can master 
Q.F. gun work in a very short time would 



THE FRINGES OF THE FLEET 15 

— though there might be friction, a court- 
martial or two, and probably losses at first 
— pay for their keep. Even a hundred or 
so of amateurs, more or less controlled by 
their squadron commanders, would make a 
happy beginning, and I am sure they would 
all be extremely grateful. 



Where the East wind is brewed fresh and 
fresh every morning, 
And the balmy night-breezes blow straight 
from the Pole, 
I heard a destroyer sing: "What an enjoya- 
ble life does one lead on the North Sea 
Patrol ! 

"To blow things to bits is our business (and 
Fritz' s) , 
Which means there are mine-fields wherever 
you stroll. 
Unless youve particular wish to die quick, 
you 11 a- 
void steering close to tlie North Sea Patrol. 

'We warn from disaster the mercantile 
master 
Who takes in high dudgeon our life-saving 
role, 

77 



78 SEA WARFARE 

For every ones grousing at docking and 
dowsing 
The marks and the lights on the North 
Sea Patrol." 

[Twelve verses omitted.] 

So swept but surviving, half drowned but 

still driving, 
I watched her head out through the swell off 

the shoal, 
And I heard her propellers roar: "Write 

to poor fellers 
Who run such a Hell as the North Sea 

Patrol!" 



PATROLS 
II 

The great basins were crammed with craft 
of kinds never know before on any Navy 
List. Some were as they were born, others 
had been converted, and a multitude have 
been designed for special cases. The Navy 
prepares against all contingencies by land, 
sea, and air. It was a relief to meet a 
batch of comprehensible destroyers and to 
drop again into the little mouse-trap ward- 
rooms, which are as large-hearted as all Our 
oceans. The men one used to know as 
destroyer-lieutenants ("born stealing") are 
serious commanders and captains to-day, 
but their sons, lieutenants in command 
and lieutenant-commanders, do follow 
them. The sea in peace is a hard life; 

79 



80 SEA WARFARE 

war only sketches an extra line or two 
round the young mouths. The routine of 
ships always ready for action is so part of 
the blood now that no one notices anything 
except the absence of formality and of the 
"crimes" of peace. What warrant officers 
used to say at length is cut down to a 
grunt. What the sailor-man did not know 
and expected to have told him, does not 
exist. He has done it all too often at sea 
and ashore. 

I watched a little party working under 
a leading hand at a job which, eighteen 
months ago, would have required a gunner 
in charge. It was comic to see his orders 
trying to overtake the execution of them. 
Ratings coming aboard carried themselves 
with a (to me) new swing — not swank, but 
consciousness of adequacy. The high, dark 
foc'sles which, thank goodness, are only 
washed twice a week, received them and 
their bags, and they turned-to on the 
instant as a man picks up his life at home. 
Like the submarine crew, they come to 
be a breed apart — double- jointed, extra- 



THE FRINGES OF THE FLEET 81 

toed, with brazen bowels and no sort of 
nerves. 

It is the same in the engine-room, when 
the ships come in for their regular looking- 
over. Those who love them, which you 
would never guess from the language, 
know exactly what they need, and get it 
without fuss. Everything that steams has 
her individual peculiarity, and the great 
thing is, at overhaul, to keep to it and not 
develop a new one. If, for example, through 
some trick of her screws not synchronising, 
a destroyer always casts to port when she 
goes astern, do not let any zealous soul try 
to make her run true, or you will have to 
learn her helm all over again. And it 
is vital that you should know exactly 
what your ship is going to do three seconds 
before she does it. Similarly with men. 
If any one, from lieutenant-commander to 
stoker, changes his personal trick or habit 
— even the manner in which he clutches his 
chin or caresses his nose at a crisis — the 
matter must be carefully considered in this 
world where each is trustee for his neigh- 



82 SEA WARFARE 

hour's life and, vastly more important, the 
corporate honour. 

"What are the destroyers doing just 
now?" I asked. 

"Oh — running about — much the same 
as usual." 

The Navy hasn't the least objection to 
telling one everything that it is doing. 
Unfortunately, it speaks its own language, 
which is incomprehensible to the civil- 
ian. But you will find it all in "The 
Channel Pilot" and "The Riddle of the 
Sands." 

It is a foul coast, hairy with currents 
and rips, and mottled with shoals and rocks. 
Practically the same men hold on here in 
the same ships, with much the same crews, 
for months and months. A most senior 
officer told me that they were "good boys" 
— on reflection, "quite good boys" — but 
neither he nor the flags on his chart ex- 
plained how they managed their lightless, 
unmarked navigations through black night, 
blinding rain, and the crazy, rebounding 
North Sea gales. They themselves ascribe 



THE FRINGES OF THE FLEET 83 

it to Joss that they have not piled up their 
ships a hundred times. 

"I expect it must be because we're 
always dodging about over the same ground. 
One gets to smell it. We've bumped pretty 
hard, of course, but we haven't expended 
much up to date. You never know your 
luck on patrol, though." 

The Nature of the Beast 

Personally, though they have been true 
friends to me, I loathe destroyers, and all 
the raw, racking, ricochetting life that goes 
with them — the smell of the wet "lammies" 
and damp wardroom cushions; the galley- 
chimney smoking out the bridge; the 
obstacle-strewn deck; and the pervading 
beastliness of oil, grit, and greasy iron. 
Even at moorings they shiver and sidle 
like half -backed horses. At sea they will 
neither rise up and fly clear like the hydro- 
planes, nor dive and be done with it like 
the submarines, but imitate the vices of 
both. A scientist of the lower deck de- 



84 SEA WARFARE 

scribes them as: "Half switchback, half 
water-chute, and Hell continuous." Their 
only merit, from a landsman's point of 
view, is that they can crumple themselves 
up from stem to bridge and (I have seen 
it) still get home. But one does not 
breathe these compliments to their com- 
manders. Other destroyers may be — they 
will point them out to you — poisonous bags 
of tricks, but their own command — never! 
Is she high-bowed? That is the only type 
which over-rides the seas instead of smother- 
ing. Is she low? Low bows glide through 
the water where those collier-nosed brutes 
smash it open. Is she mucked up with 
submarine-catchers? They rather improve 
her trim. No other ship has them. Have 
they been denied to her? Thank Heaven, 
we go to sea without a fish-curing plant on 
deck. Does she roll, even for her class? 
She is drier than Dreadnoughts. Is she 
permanently and infernally wet? Stiff, sir 
— stiff: the first requisite of a gun-plat- 
form. 



THE FRINGES OF THE FLEET 85 

"Service as Requisite" 

Thus the Caesars and their fortunes put 
out to sea with their subs and their sad- 
eyed engineers, and their long-suffering 
signallers — I do not even know the technical 
name of the sin which causes a man to be 
born a destroyer-signaller in this life — and 
the little yellow shells stuck all about where 
they can be easiest reached. The rest of 
their acts is written for the information of 
the proper authorities. It reads like a page 
of Todhunter. But the masters of merchant- 
ships could tell more of eyeless shapes, 
barely outlined on the foam of their own 
arrest, who shout orders through the thick 
gloom alongside. The strayed and anxious 
neutral knows them when their search- 
lights pin him across the deep, or their 
syrens answer the last yelp of his as steam 
goes out of his torpedoed boilers. They 
stand by to catch and soothe him in his 
pyjamas at the gangway, collect his scattered 
lifeboats, and see a warm drink into him 
before they turn to hunt the slayer. The 



86 SEA WARFARE 

drifters, punching and reeling up and down 
their ten-mile line of traps; the outer 
trawlers, drawing the very teeth of Death 
with water-sodden fingers, are grateful for 
their low, guarded signals; and when the 
Zeppelin's revealing star-shell cracks dark- 
ness open above him, the answering crack 
of the invisible destroyers' guns comforts 
the busy mine-layers. Big cruisers talk to 
them, too; and, what is more, they talk back 
to the cruisers. Sometimes they draw fire 
— pinkish spurts of light — a long way off, 
where Fritz is trying to coax them over a 
mine-field he has just laid; or they steal 
on Fritz in the midst of his job, and the 
horizon rings with barking, which the inevit- 
able neutral who saw it all reports as "a 
heavy fleet action in the North Sea." The 
sea after dark can be as alive as the woods of 
summer nights. Everything is exactly where 
you don't expect it, and the shyest creatures 
are the farthest away from their holes. 
Things boom overhead like bitterns, or 
scutter alongside like hares, or arise dripping 
and hissing from below like otters. It is 



THE FRINGES OF THE FLEET 87 

the destroyer's business to find out what 
their business may be through all the long 
night, and to help or hinder accordingly. 
Dawn sees them pitch-poling insanely be- 
tween head-seas, or hanging on to bridges 
that sweep like scythes from one forlorn 
horizon to the other. A homeward-bound 
submarine chooses this hour to rise, very 
ostentatiously, and signals by hand to a 
lieutenant in command. (They were the 
same term at Dartmouth, and same first 
ship.) 

"What's he sayin'? Secure that gun, 
will you? 'Can't hear oneself speak." The 
gun is a bit noisy on its mountings, but that 
isn't the reason for the destroyer-lieuten- 
ant's short temper. 

" 'Says he's goin' down, sir," the signaller 
replies. What the submarine had spelt out, 
and everybody knows it, was: "Cannot 
approve of this extremely frightful weather. 
Am going to bye-bye." 

"W T ell!" snaps the lieutenant to his 
signaller, "what are you grinning at?" 
The submarine has hung on to ask if the 



88 SEA WARFARE 

destroyer will "kiss her and whisper good- 
night." A breaking sea smacks her tower 
in the middle of the insult. She closes like 
an oyster, but — just too late. Habet ! 
There must be a quarter of a ton of water 
somewhere down below, on its way to her 
ticklish batteries. 

"What a wag!" says the signaller, 
dreamily. "Well, 'e can't say 'e didn't get 
'is little kiss." 

The lieutenant in command smiles. The 
sea is a beast, but a just beast. 

Racial Untruths 

This is trivial enough, but what would 
you have? If admirals will not strike the 
proper attitudes, nor lieutenants emit the 
appropriate sentiments, one is forced back 
on the truth, which is that the men at the 
heart of the great matters in our Empire 
are, mostly, of an even simplicity. From 
the advertising point of view they are 
stupid, but the breed has always been 
stupid in this department. It may be due, 



THE FRINGES OF THE FLEET 89 

as our enemies assert, to our racial snobbery, 
or, as others hold, to a certain God-given 
lack of imagination which saves us from 
being over-concerned at the effects of our 
appearances on others. Either way, it 
deceives the enemies' people more than 
any calculated lie. When you come to 
think of it, though the English are the 
worst paper-work and viva voce liars in 
the world, they have been rigorously trained 
since their early youth to live and act lies 
for the comfort of the society in which they 
move, and so for their own comfort. The 
result in this war is interesting. 

It is no lie that at the present moment 
we hold all the seas in the hollow of our 
hands. For that reason we shuffle over 
them shame-faced and apologetic, making 
arrangements here and flagrant compromises 
there, in order to give substance to the lie 
that we have dropped fortuitously into this 
high seat and are looking round the world 
for some one to resign it to. Nor is it 
any lie that, had we used the Navy's bare 
fist instead of its gloved hand from the 



90 SEA WARFARE 

beginning, we could in all likelihood have 
shortened the war. That being so, we 
elected to dab and peck at and half -strangle 
the enemy, to let him go and choke him 
again. It is no lie that we continue on 
our inexplicable path animated, we will try 
to believe till other proof is given, by a 
cloudy idea of alleviating or mitigating 
something for somebody — not ourselves. 
[Here, of course, is where our racial snob- 
bery comes in, which makes the German 
gibber. I cannot understand why he has 
not accused us to our Allies of having 
secret commercial understandings with him.] 
For that reason, we shall finish the German 
eagle as the merciful lady killed the chicken. 
It took her the whole afternoon, and then, 
you will remember, the carcase had to be 
thrown away. 

Meantime, there is a large and unlovely 
water, inhabited by plain men in severe 
boats, who endure cold, exposure, wet, and 
monotony almost as heavy as their responsi- 
bilities. Charge them with heroism — but 
that needs heroism, indeed! Accuse them 



THE FRINGES OF THE FLEET 91 

of patriotism, they become ribald. Examine 
into the records of the miraculous work 
they have done and are doing. They will 
assist you, but with perfect sincerity they 
will make as light of the valour and fore- 
thought shown as of the ends they have 
gained for mankind. The Service takes all 
work for granted. It knew long ago that 
certain things would have to be done, and 
it did its best to be ready for them. When it 
disappeared over the sky-line for manoeuvres 
it was practising — always practising; trying 
its men and stuff and throwing out what 
could not take the strain. That is why, 
when war came, only a few names had to 
be changed, and those chiefly for the sake 
of the body, not of the spirit. And the 
Seniors who hold the key to our plans and 
know what will be done if things happen, 
and what lines wear thin in the many chains, 
they are of one fibre and speech with the 
Juniors and the lower deck and all the rest 
who come out of the undemonstrative 
households ashore. "Here is the situation 
as it exists now," say the Seniors. "This 



92 SEA WARFARE 

is what we do to meet it. Look and count 
and measure and judge for yourself, and 
then you will know." 

It is a safe offer. The civilian only sees 
that the sea is a vast place, divided between 
wisdom and chance. He only knows that 
the uttermost oceans have been swept clear, 
and the trade-routes purged, one by one, 
even as our armies were being convoyed 
along them ; that there was no island nor key 
left unsearched on any waters that might 
hide an enemy's craft between the Arctic 
Circle and the Horn. He only knows that 
less than a day's run to the eastward of 
where he stands, the enemy's fleets have 
been held for a year and four months, in 
order that civilisation may go about its 
business on all our waters. 



TALES OF "THE TRADE'' 

(1916) 



"THE TRADE" 

They bear, in place of classic names. 

Letters and numbers on their skin. 
They plan their grisly blindfold games 

In little boxes made of tin. 

Sometimes they stalk the Zeppelin, 
Sometimes they learn where mines are laid, 

Or where the Baltic ice is thin. 
That is the custom of " The Trade." 

Few prize-courts sit upon their claims. 

They seldom tow their targets in. 
They follow certain secret aims 

Down under, far from strife or din. 

When they are ready to begin 
No flag is flown, no fuss is made 

More than the shearing of a pin. 
That is the custom of " The Trade." 

96 



96 SEA WARFARE 

The Scout's quadruple funnel flames 

A mark from Sweden to the Swin, 
The Cruisers thunderous screw proclaims 

Her comings out and goings in: 

But only whiffs of paraffin 
Or creamy rings that fizz and fade 

Show where the one-eyed Death has been. 
That is the custom of " The Trade." 

Their feats, their fortunes and their fames 
Are hidden from their nearest kin; 

No eager public backs or blames, 

No journal prints the yarns they spin 
( The Censor would not let it in !) 

When they return from run or raid. 
Unlieard they work, unseen they win. 

That is the custom of " The Trade." 



SOME WORK IN THE BALTIC 

No one knows how the title of "The 
Trade" came to be applied to the Sub- 
marine Service. Some say that the cruisers 
invented it because they pretend that sub- 
marine officers look like unwashed chauf- 
feurs. Others think it sprang forth by itself, 
which means that it was coined by the Lower 
Deck, where they always have the proper 
names for things. Whatever the truth, the 
Submarine Service is now "the trade"; and 
if you ask them why, they will answer : "What 
else could you call it ? The Trade ' s ' the trade , ' 
of course." 

It is a close corporation; yet it recruits 
its men and officers from every class that 
uses the sea and engines, as well as from 

97 



98 SEA WARFARE 

many classes that never expected to deal 
with either. It takes them; they disappear 
for a while and return changed to their very 
souls, for the Trade lives in a world without 
precedents, of which no generation has had 
any previous experience — a world still being 
made and enlarged daily. It creates and 
settles its own problems as it goes along, 
and if it cannot help itself no one else can. 
So the Trade lives in the dark and thinks 
out inconceivable and impossible things 
which it afterwards puts into practice. 

It keeps books, too, as honest traders 
should. They are almost as bald as ledgers, 
and are written up, hour by hour, on a little 
sliding table that pulls out from beneath 
the commanders' bunk. In due time they 
go to my Lords of the Admiralty, who 
presently circulate a few carefully watered 
extracts for the confidential information of 
the junior officers of the Trade, that these 
may see what things are done and how. 
The Juniors read but laugh. They have 
heard the stories, with all the flaming detail 
and much of the language, either from a 



TALES OF "THE TRADE" 99 

chief actor while they perched deferentially 
on the edge of a mess-room fender, or from 
his subordinate, in which case they were 
not so deferential, or from some returned 
member of the crew present on the occasion, 
who, between half -shut teeth at the wheel, 
jerks out what really happened. There is 
very little going on in the Trade that the 
Trade does not know within a reasonable 
time. But the outside world must wait 
until my Lords of the Admiralty release 
the records. Some of them have been 
released now. 

Submarine and Ice-breaker 

Let us take, almost at random, an episode 
in the life of H.M. Submarine E 9. It is 
true that she was commanded by Com- 
mander Max Horton, but the utter im- 
personality of the tale makes it as though 
the boat herself spoke. (Also, never hav- 
ing met or seen any of the gentlemen 
concerned in the matter, the writer can 
be impersonal too.) Some time ago, E 9 



100 SEA WARFARE 

was in the Baltic, in the deeps of winter, 
where she used to be taken to her hunting 
grounds by an ice-breaker. Obviously a 
submarine cannot use her sensitive nose to 
smash heavy ice with, so the broad-beamed 
pushing chaperone comes along to see her 
clear of the thick harbour and shore ice. 
In the open sea apparently she is left 
to her own devices. In company of the 
ice-breaker, then, E 9 "proceeded" (neither 
in the Senior nor the Junior Service does 
any one officially "go" anywhere) to a 
"certain position." 

Here — it is not stated in the book, but 
the Trade knows every aching, single detail 
of what is left out — she spent a certain 
time in testing arrangements and apparatus, 
which may or may not work properly when 
immersed in a mixture of block-ice and dirty 
ice-cream in a temperature well towards 
zero. This is a pleasant job, made the 
more delightful by the knowledge that if 
you slip off the superstructure the deadly 
Baltic chill will stop your heart long before 
even your heavy clothes can drown you. 



TALES OF " THE TRADE " 101 

Hence (and this is not in the book either) 
the remark of the highly trained sailor-man 
in these latitudes who, on being told by 
his superior officer in the execution of his 
duty to go to Hell, did insubordinately and 
enviously reply: "D'you think I'd be here 
if I could?" Whereby he caused the entire 
personnel, beginning with the commander, 
to say "Amen," or words to that effect. 
E 9 evidently made things work. 

Next day she reports: "As circum- 
stances were favourable decided to attempt 
to bag a destroyer. ' ' Her * ' certain position 
must have been near a well-used destroyer- 
run, for shortly afterwards she sees three of 
them, but too far off to attack, and later, as 
the light is failing, a fourth destroyer towards 
which she manoeuvres. "Depth-keeping," 
she notes, "very difficult owing to heavy 
swell." An observation balloon on a gusty 
day is almost as stable as a submarine 
"pumping" in a heavy swell, and since 
the Baltic is shallow, the submarine runs 
the chance of being let down with a whack 
on the bottom. None the less, E 9 works 



102 SEA WARFARE 

her way to within 600 yards of the quarry; 
fires and waits just long enough to be sure 
that her torpedo is running straight, and 
that the destroyer is holding her course. 
Then she "dips to avoid detection." The 
rest is deadly simple: "At the correct 
moment after firing, 45 to 50 seconds, heard 
the unmistakable noise of torpedo detonat- 
ing." Four minutes later she rose and 
"found destroyer had disappeared." Then, 
for reasons probably connected with other 
destroyers, who, too, may have heard that 
unmistakable sound, she goes to bed below 
in the chill dark till it is time to turn home- 
wards. When she rose she met storm from 
the north and logged it accordingly. " Spray 
froze as it struck, and bridge became a mass 
of ice. Experienced considerable difficulty 
in keeping the conning-tower hatch free 
from ice. Found it necessary to keep a 
man continuously employed on this work. 
Bridge screen immovable, ice six inches 
thick on it. Telegraphs frozen." In this 
state she forges ahead till midnight, and 
any one who pleases can imagine the 



TALES OF " THE TRADE " 103 

thoughts of the continuous employee scrap- 
ing and hammering round the hatch, as 
well as the delight of his friends below 
when the ice-slush spattered down the 
conning-tower. At last she considered it 
"advisable to free the boat of ice, so went 
below." 

"As Requisite" 

In the Senior Service the two words 
"as requisite" cover everything that need 
not be talked about. E 9 next day "pro- 
ceeded as requisite" through a series of 
snowstorms and recurring deposits of ice 
on the bridge till she got in touch with her 
friend the ice-breaker; and in her company 
ploughed and rooted her way back to the 
work we know. There is nothing to show 
that it was a near thing for E 9, but some- 
how one has the idea that the ice-breaker 
did not arrive any too soon for E 9's comfort 
and progress. (But what happens in the 
Baltic when the ice-breaker does not arrive?) 

That was in winter. In summer quite 
the other way, E 9 had to go to bed by 



104 SEA WARFARE 

day very often under the long-lasting 
northern light when the Baltic is as smooth 
as a carpet, and one cannot get within a 
mile and a half of anything with eyes in its 
head without being put down. There was 
one time when E 9, evidently on information 
received, took up "a certain position" and 
reported the sea "glassy." She had to 
suffer in silence, while three heavily laden 
German ships went by; for an attack would 
have given away her position. Her reward 
came next day, when she sighted (the words 
run like Marry at's) "enemy squadron com- 
ing up fast from eastward, proceeding 
inshore of us." They were two heavy 
battleships with an escort of destroyers, and 
E 9 turned to attack. She does not say 
how she crept up in that smooth sea within 
a quarter of a mile of the leading ship, "a 
three-funnel ship, of either the Deutschland 
or Braunschweig class," but she managed 
it, and fired both bow torpedoes at her. 

"No. 1 torpedo was seen and heard to 
strike her just before foremost funnel: 
smoke and debris appeared to go as high 



TALES OF "THE TRADE" 105 

as masthead." That much E 9 saw before 
one of the guardian destroyers ran at her. 
"So," says she, "observing her I took my 
periscope off the battleship." This was 
excusable, as the destroyer was coming up 
with intent to kill and E 9 had to flood 
her tanks and get down quickly. Even so, 
the destroyer only just missed her, and she 
struck bottom in 43 feet. "But," says E 9, 
who, if she could not see, kept her ears 
open, "at the correct interval (the 45 or 50 
seconds mentioned in the previous case) the 
second torpedo was heard to explode, 
though not actually seen." E 9 came up 
twenty minutes later to make sure. The 
destroyer was waiting for her a couple of 
hundred yards away, and again E 9 dipped 
for the life, but "just had time to see one 
large vessel approximately four or five miles 
away." 

Putting courage aside, think for a mo- 
ment of the mere drill of it all — that last 
dive for that attack on the chosen battle- 
ship; the eye at the periscope watching 
"No. 1 torpedo" get home; the rush of the 



106 SEA WARFARE 

vengeful destroyer; the instant orders for 
flooding everything; the swift descent which 
had to be arranged for with full knowl- 
edge of the shallow sea-floors waiting below, 
and a guess at the course that might be 
taken by the seeking bows above, for as- 
suming a destroyer to draw 10 feet and a 
submarine on the bottom to stand 25 feet 
to the top of her conning-tower, there is 
not much clearance in 43 feet salt water, 
specially if the boat jumps when she touches 
bottom. And through all these and half a 
hundred other simultaneous considerations, 
imagine the trained minds below, counting, 
as only torpedo-men can count, the run of 
the merciless seconds that should tell when 
that second shot arrived. Then "at the 
correct interval" as laid down in the table 
of distances, the boom and the jar of No. 2 
torpedo, the relief, the exhaled breath and 
untightened lips; the impatient waiting for 
a second peep, and when that had been 
taken and the eye at the periscope had re- 
ported one little nigger-boy in place of two 
on the waters, perhaps cigarettes, etc., while 



TALES OF "THE TRADE" 107 

the destroyer sickled about at a venture 
overhead. 

Certainly they give men rewards for 
doing such things, but what reward can 
there be in any gift of Kings or peoples to 
match the enduring satisfaction of having 
done them, not alone, but with and through 
and by trusty and proven companions? 

Defeated by Darkness 

E 1, also a Baltic boat, her commander 
F. N. Laurence, had her experiences too. 
She went out one summer day and late — 
too late — in the evening sighted three 
transports. The first she hit. While she 
was arranging for the second, the third 
inconsiderately tried to ram her before her 
sights were on. So it was necessary to go 
down at once and waste whole minutes of 
the precious scanting light. When she 
rose, the stricken ship was sinking and 
shortly afterwards blew up. The other two 
were patrolling near by. It would have 
been a fair chance in daylight, but the 



108 SEA WARFARE 

darkness defeated her and she had to give 
up the attack. 

It was E 1 who during thick weather 
came across a squadron of battle-cruisers 
and got in on a flanking ship — probably the 
Moltke. The destroyers were very much 
on the alert, and she had to dive at once to 
avoid one who only missed her by a few feet. 
Then the fog shut down and stopped further 
developments. Thus do time and chance 
come to every man. 

The Trade has many stories, too, of 
watching patrols when a boat must see 
chance after chance go by under her nose 
and write — merely write — what she has 
seen. Naturally they do not appear in any 
accessible records. Nor, which is a pity, 
do the authorities release the records of 
glorious failures, when everything goes 
wrong; when torpedoes break surface and 
squatter like ducks; or arrive full square 
with a clang and burst of white water and — 
fail to explode; when the devil is in charge 
of all the motors, and clutches develop play 
that would scare a shore-going mechanic 



TALES OF "THE TRADE" 109 

bald; when batteries begin to give off death 
instead of power, and atop of all, ice or 
wreckage of the strewn seas racks and 
wrenches the hull till the whole leaking bag 
of tricks limps home on six missing cylinders 
and one ditto propeller, plus the indomitable 
will of the red-eyed husky scarecrows in 
charge. 

There might be worse things in this 
world for decent people to read than such 
records. 



n 



BUSINESS IN THE SEA OF 
MARMORA 

This war is like an iceberg. We, the 
public, only see an eighth of it above water. 
The rest is out of sight and, as with the 
berg, one guesses its extent by great blocks 
that break off and shoot up to the surface 
from some underlying out-running spur a 
quarter of a mile away. So with this war 
sudden tales come to light which reveal un- 
suspected activities in unexpected quarters. 
One takes it for granted such things are 
always going on somewhere, but the actual 
emergence of the record is always astonish- 
ing. 

Once upon a time, there were certain E 
type boats who worked the Sea of Marmora 

111 



112 SEA WARFARE 

with thoroughness and humanity; for the 
two, in English hands, are compatible. 
The road to their hunting-grounds was 
strewn with peril, the waters they inhabited 
were full of eyes that gave them no rest, 
and what they lost or expended in wear and 
tear of the chase could not be made good 
till they had run the gauntlet to their base 
again. The full tale of their improvisations 
and "makee-does" will probably never come 
to light, though fragments can be picked 
up at intervals in the proper places as 
the men concerned come and go. The 
Admiralty gives only the bones, but those 
are not so dry, of the boat's official story. 

When E 14, Commander E. Courtney- 
Boyle, went to her work in the Sea of 
Marmora, she, like her sister, "proceeded" 
on her gas-engine up the Dardanelles; and a 
gas-engine by night between steep cliffs has 
been described by the Lower-deck as a 
"full brass band in a railway cutting." So 
a fort picked her up with a searchlight and 
missed her with artillery. She dived under 
the minefield that guarded the Straits, and 



TALES OF "THE TRADE" 113 

when she rose at dawn in the narrowest 
part of the channel, which is about one mile 
and a half across, all the forts fired at her. 
The water, too, was thick with steamboat 
patrols, out of which E 14 selected a 
Turkish gunboat and gave her a torpedo. 
She had just time to see the great column 
of water shoot as high as the gunboat's 
mast when she had to dip again as "the 
men in a small steamboat were leaning 
over trying to catch hold of the top of my 
periscope." 

"Six Hours of Blind Death" 

This sentence, which might have come 
out of a French exercise book, is all 
Lieutenant-Commander Courtney-Boyle 
sees fit to tell, and that officer will never 
understand why one taxpayer at least 
demands his arrest after the war till he shall 
have given the full tale. Did he sight the 
shadowy underline of the small steamboat 
green through the deadlights? Or did she 
suddenly swim into his vision from behind, 



114 SEA WARFARE 

and obscure, without warning, his periscope 
with a single brown clutching hand? Was 
she alone, or one of a mob of splashing, 
shouting small craft? He may well have 
been too busy to note, for there were 
patrols all around him, a minefield of 
curious design and undefined area some- 
where in front, and steam trawlers vigorously 
sweeping for him astern and ahead. And 
when E 14 had burrowed and bumped and 
scraped through six hours of blind death, 
she found the Sea of Marmora crawling 
with craft, and was kept down almost con- 
tinuously and grew hot and stuffy in 
consequence. Nor could she charge her 
batteries in peace, so at the end of another 
hectic, hunted day of starting them up and 
breaking off and diving — which is bad for 
the temper — she decided to quit those 
infested waters near the coast and charge 
up somewhere off the traffic routes. 

This accomplished, after a long, hot run, 
which did the motors no good, she went 
back to her beat, where she picked up three 
destroyers convoying a couple of troopships. 



TALES OF "THE TRADE " 115 

But it was a glassy calm and the destroyers 
"came for me." She got off a long-range 
torpedo at one transport, and ducked before 
she could judge results. She apologises for 
this on the grounds that one of her peri- 
scopes had been damaged — not, as one 
would expect, by the gentleman leaning 
out of the little steamboat, but by some 
casual shot — calibre not specified — the day 
before. "And so," says E 14, "I could 
not risk my remaining one being bent." 
However, she heard a thud, and the depth- 
gauges — those great clock-hands on the 
white-faced circles — "flicked," which is 
another sign of dreadful certainty down 
under. When she rose again she saw a 
destroyer convoying one burning transport 
to the nearest beach. That afternoon she 
met a sister-boat (now gone to Valhalla), 
who told her that she was almost out of 
torpedoes, and they arranged a rendezvous 
for next day, but "before we could com- 
municate we had to dive, and I did not see 
her again." There must be many such 
meetings in the Trade, under all skies — 



116 SEA WARFARE 

boat rising beside boat at the point agreed 
upon for interchange of news and materials ; 
the talk shouted aloud with the speakers' 
eyes always on the horizon and all hands 
standing by to dive, even in the middle of a 
sentence. 

Annoying Patrol Ships 

E 14 kept to her job, on the edge of 
the procession of traffic. Patrol vessels 
annoyed her to such an extent that "as I 
had not seen any transports lately I decided 
to sink a patrol-ship as they were always 
firing on me." So she torpedoed a thing 
that looked like a mine-layer, and must 
have been something of that kidney, for it 
sank in less than a minute. A tramp- 
steamer lumbering across the dead flat sea 
was thoughtfully headed back to Con- 
stantinople by firing rifles ahead of her. 
"Under fire the whole day," E 14 observes 
philosophically. The nature of her work 
made this inevitable. She was all among 
the patrols, which kept her down a good 
deal and made her draw on her batteries, 



TALES OF "THE TRADE" 117 

and when she rose to charge, watchers 
ashore burned oil-flares on the beach or 
made smokes among the hills according to 
the light. In either case there would be 
a general rush of patrolling craft of all 
kinds, from steam launches to gunboats. 
Nobody loves the Trade, though E 14 did 
several things which made her popular. 
She let off a string of very surprised dhows 
(they were empty) in charge of a tug which 
promptly fled back to Constantinople; 
stopped a couple of steamers full of ref- 
ugees, also bound for Constantinople, who 
were "very pleased at being allowed to 
proceed" instead of being lusitaniaed as 
they had expected. Another refugee-boat, 
fleeing from goodness knows what horror, 
she chased into Rodosto Harbour, where, 
though she could not see any troops, "they 
opened a heavy rifle fire on us, hitting the 
boat several times. So I went away and 
chased two more small tramps who returned 
towards Constantinople." 

Transports, of course, were fair game, 
and in spite of the necessity she was under 



118 SEA WARFARE 

of not risking her remaining eye, E 14 got 
a big one in a night of wind and made 
another hurriedly beach itself, which then 
opened fire on her, assisted by the local 
population. "Returned fire and proceeded," 
says E 14. The diversion of returning fire 
is one much appreciated by the lower-deck 
as furnishing a pleasant break in what 
otherwise might be a monotonous and 
odoriferous task. There is no drill laid 
down for this evolution, but etiquette and 
custom prescribe that on going up the hatch 
you shall not too energetically prod the 
next man ahead with the muzzle of your 
rifle. Likewise, when descending in quick 
time before the hatch closes, you are re- 
quested not to jump directly on the head 
of the next below. Otherwise you act "as 
requisite" on your own initiative. 

When she had used up all her torpedoes 
E 14 prepared to go home by the way she 
had come — there was no other — and was 
chased towards Gallipoli by a mixed pack 
composed of a gunboat, a torpedo-boat, and 
a tug. "They shepherded me to Gallipoli, 



TALES OF "THE TRADE" 119 

one each side of me and one astern, evi- 
dently expecting me to be caught by the 
nets there." She walked very delicately for 
the next eight hours or so, all down the 
Straits, underrunning the strong tides, 
ducking down when the fire from the forts 
got too hot, verifying her position and the 
position of the minefield, but always taking 
notes of every ship in sight, till towards 
teatime she saw our Navy off the entrance 
and "rose to the surface abeam of a French 
battleship who gave us a rousing cheer." 
She had been away, as nearly as possible, 
three weeks, and a kind destroyer escorted 
her to the base, where we will leave her 
for the moment while we consider the per- 
formance of E 11 (Lieutenant-Commander 
M. E. Nasmith) in the same waters at 
about the same season. 

E 11 "proceeded" in the usual way, to 
the usual accompaniments of hostile de- 
stroyers, up the Straits, and meets the 
usual difficulties about charging-up when 
she gets through. Her wireless naturally 
takes this opportunity to give trouble, and 



120 SEA WARFARE 

E 11 is left, deaf and dumb, somewhere in 
the middle of the Sea of Marmora, diving 
to avoid hostile destroyers in the intervals 
of trying to come at the fault in her aerial. 
(Yet it is noteworthy that the language of 
the Trade, though technical, is no more 
emphatic or incandescent than that of 
top-side ships.) 

Then she goes towards Constantinople, 
finds a Turkish torpedo-gunboat off the 
port, sinks her, has her periscope smashed 
by a six-pounder, retires, fits a new top on 
the periscope, and at 10.30 a. m. — they must 
have needed it — pipes "All hands to bathe." 
Much refreshed, she gets her wireless linked 
up at last, and is able to tell the authorities 
where she is and what she is after. 



Mr. Silas Q. Swing 

At this point — it was off Rodosto — 
enter a small steamer which does not halt 
when requested, and so is fired at with 
"several rounds" from a rifle. The crew, 
on being told to abandon her, tumble into 



TALES OF "THE TRADE" 121 

their boats with such haste that they 
capsize two out of three. "Fortunately," 
says Ell, "they are able to pick up every- 
body." You can imagine to yourself the 
confusion alongside, the raffle of odds and 
ends floating out of the boats, and the 
general parti-coloured hurrah's-nest all over 
the bright broken water. What you can- 
not imagine is this: "An American gentle- 
man then appeared on the upper deck 
who informed us that his name was Silas 
Q. Swing, of the Chicago Sun, and that 
he was pleased to make our acquaintance. 
He then informed us that the steamer 
was proceeding to Chanak and he wasn't 
sure if there were any stores aboard." 
If anything could astonish the Trade at 
this late date, one would almost fancy that 
the apparition of Silas Q. Swing ("very 
happy to meet you, gentlemen") might 
have started a rivet or two on E ll's placid 
skin. But she never even quivered. She 
kept a lieutenant of the name of D'Oyley 
Hughes, an expert in demolition parties; 
and he went aboard the tramp and reported 



122 SEA WARFARE 

any quantity of stores — a six-inch gun, for 
instance, lashed across the top of the fore- 
hatch (Silas Q. Swing must have been an 
unobservant journalist), a six-inch gun- 
niounting in the forehold, pedestals for 
twelve-pounders thrown in as dunnage, the 
afterhold full of six-inch projectiles, and 
a scattering of other commodities. They 
put the demolition charge well in among 
the six-inch stuff, and she took it all to 
the bottom in a few minutes, after being 
touched off. 

"Simultaneously with the sinking of the 
vessel," the E 11 goes on, "smoke was 
observed to the eastward." It was a 
steamer who had seen the explosion and 
was running for Rodosto. E 11 chased her 
till she tied up to Rodosto pier, and then 
torpedoed her where she lay — a heavily 
laden store-ship piled high with packing- 
cases. The water was shallow here, and 
though E 11 bumped along the bottom, 
which does not make for steadiness of aim, 
she was forced to show a good deal of her 
only periscope, and had it dented, but not 



TALES OF " THE TRADE " 123 

damaged by rifle-fire from the beach. As 
she moved out of Rodosto Bay she saw a 
paddle-boat loaded with barbed wire, which 
stopped on the hail, but "as we ranged 
alongside her, attempted to ram us, but 
failed owing to our superior speed." Then 
she ran for the beach "very skilfully," keep- 
ing her stern to E 11 till she drove ashore 
beneath some cliffs. The demolition-squad 
were just getting to work when "a party of 
horsemen appeared on the cliffs above and 
opened a hot fire on the conning tower." 
E 11 got out, but owing to the shoal water 
it was some time before she could get under 
enough to fire a torpedo. The stern of a 
stranded paddle-boat is no great target and 
the thing exploded on the beach. Then she 
"recharged batteries and proceeded slowly 
on the surface towards Constantinople." 
All this between the ordinary office hours of 
10 a. m. and 4 p. m. 

Her next day's work opens, as no pallid 
writer of fiction dare begin, thus: "Having 
dived unobserved into Constantinople, ob- 
served, etc." Her observations were rather 



124 SEA WARFARE 

hampered by cross-tides, mud, and currents, 
as well as the vagaries of one of her own 
torpedoes which turned upside down and ran 
about promiscuously. It hit something at 
last, and so did another shot that she fired, 
but the waters by Constantinople Arsenal 
are not healthy to linger in after one has 
scared up the whole sea-front, so "turned to 
go out." Matters were a little better below, 
and E 11 in her perilous passage might 
have been a lady of the harem tied up in 
a sack and thrown into the Bosporus. She 
grounded heavily; she bounced up 30 feet, 
was headed down again by a manoeuvre 
easier to shudder over than to describe, and 
when she came to rest on the bottom found 
herself being swivelled right round the com- 
pass. They watched the compass with much 
interest. "It was concluded, therefore, that 
the vessel (E 11 is one of the few who 
speaks of herself as a 'vessel' as well as a 
'boat') was resting on the shoal under the 
Leander Tower, and was being turned round 
by the current.'' So they corrected her, 
started the motors, and "bumped gently 



TALES OF "THE TRADE" 125 

down into 85 feet of water" with no more 
knowledge than the lady in the sack where 
the next bump would land them. 

The Preening Perch 

And the following day was spent "resting 
in the centre of the Sea of Marmora." That 
was their favourite preening perch between 
operations, because it gave them a chance to 
tidy the boat and bathe, and they were a 
cleanly people both in their methods and 
their persons. When they boarded a craft 
and found nothing of consequence they 
"parted with many expressions of good 
will," and E 11 "had a good wash." She 
gives her reasons at length; for going in 
and out of Constantinople and the Straits 
is all in the day's work, but going dirty, 
you understand, is serious. She had "of late 
noticed the atmosphere in the boat becom- 
ing very oppressive, the reason doubtless 
being that there was a quantity of dirty linen 
aboard, and also the scarcity of fresh water 
necessitated a limit being placed on the 
frequency of personal washing." Hence the 



126 SEA WARFARE 

centre of the Sea of Marmora; all hands 
playing overside and as much laundry work 
as time and the Service allowed. One of the 
reasons, by the way, why we shall be good 
friends with the Turk again is that he has 
many of our ideas about decency. 

In due time E 11 went back to her base. 
She had discovered a way of using unspent 
torpedoes twice over, which surprised the 
enemy, and she had as nearly as possible 
been cut down by a ship which she thought 
was running away from her. Instead of 
which (she made the discovery at three 
thousand yards, both craft all out) the 
stranger steamed straight at her. "The 
enemy then witnessed a somewhat spec- 
tacular dive at full speed from the surface to 
20 feet in as many seconds. He then really 
did turn tail and was seen no more." Going 
through the Straits she observed an empty 
troopship at anchor, but reserved her tor- 
pedoes in the hope of picking up some 
battleships lower down. Not finding these 
in the Narrows, she nosed her way back 
and sank the trooper, "afterwards continu- 



TALES OF "THE TRADE" 127 

ing journey down the Straits." Off Kilid 
Bahr something happened; she got out of 
trim and had to be fully flooded before she 
could be brought to her required depth. It 
might have been whirlpools under water, or 
— other things. (They tell a story of a boat 
which once went mad in these very waters, 
and for no reason ascertainable from within 
plunged to depths that contractors do not 
allow for; rocketed up again like a swordfish, 
and would doubtless have so continued till 
she died, had not something she had fouled 
dropped off and let her recover her com- 
posure.) 

An hour later: "Heard a noise similar 
to grounding. Knowing this to be im- 
possible in the water in which the boat then 
was, I came up to 20 feet to investigate, and 
observed a large mine preceding the peri- 
scope at a distance of about 20 feet, which 
was apparently hung up by its moorings to 
the port hydroplane." Hydroplanes are the 
fins at bow and stern which regulate a sub- 
marine's diving. A mine weighs anything 
from hundredweights to half -tons. Some- 



128 SEA WARFARE 

times it explodes if you merely think about 
it; at others you can batter it like an empty 
sardine-tin and it submits meekly ; but at no 
time is it meant to wear on a hydroplane. 
They dared not come up to unhitch it, 
"owing to the batteries ashore," so they 
pushed the dim shape ahead of them till 
they got outside Kum Kale. They then 
went full astern, and emptied the after- 
tanks, which brought the bows down, and 
in this posture rose to the surface, when 
"the rush of water from the screws together 
with the sternway gathered allowed the 
mine to fall clear of the vessel." 

Now a fool, said Dr. Johnson, would 
have tried to describe that. 



Ill 

RAVAGES AND REPAIRS 

Before we pick up the further adventures 
of H.M. Submarine E 14 and her partner 
Ell, here is what you might call a cutting- 
out affair in the Sea of Marmora which E 12 
(Lieutenant-Commander K. M. Bruce) put 
through quite on the old lines. 

E 12's main motors gave trouble from the 
first, and she seems to have been a cripple 
for most of that trip. She sighted two small 
steamers, one towing two, and the other 
three, sailing vessels; making seven keels in 
all. She stopped the first steamer, noticed 
she carried a lot of stores, and, moreover, 
that her crew — she had no boats — were all 
on deck in life-belts. Not seeing any gun, 
E 12 ran up alongside and told the first 
lieutenant to board. The steamer then 

129 



130 SEA WARFARE 

threw a bomb at E 12, which struck, but 
luckily did not explode, and opened fire on 
the boarding-party with rifles and a con- 
cealed 1-in. gun. E 12 answered with her 
six-pounder, and also with rifles. The two 
sailing ships in tow, very properly, tried to 
foul E 12's propellers and "also opened fire 
with rifles." 

It was as Orientally mixed a fight as a 
man could wish: The first lieutenant and 
the boarding-party engaged on the steamer, 
E 12 foul of the steamer, and being fouled by 
the sailing ships; the six-pounder methodi- 
cally perforating the steamer from bow to 
stern; the steamer's 1-in. gun and the rifles 
from the sailing ships raking everything and 
everybody else; E 12's coxswain on the 
conning-tower passing up ammunition; and 
E 12's one workable motor developing 
"slight defects" at, of course, the moment 
when power to manoeuvre was vital. 

The account is almost as difficult to dis- 
entangle as the actual mess must have been. 
At any rate, the six-pounder caused an ex- 
plosion in the steamer's ammunition, where- 



TALES OF "THE TRADE" 131 

by the steamer sank in a quarter of an hour, 
giving time — and a hot time it must have 
been — for E 12 to get clear of her and to 
sink the two sailing ships. She then chased 
the second steamer, who slipped her three 
tows and ran for the shore. E 12 knocked 
her about a good deal with gun-fire as she 
fled, saw her drive on the beach well alight, 
and then, since the beach opened fire with a 
gun at 1500 yards, went away to retinker 
her motors and write up her log. She ap- 
proved of her first lieutenant's behaviour 
"under very trying circumstances" (this 
probably refers to the explosion of the am- 
munition by the six-pounder which, doubt- 
less, jarred the boarding-party) and of the 
cox who acted as ammunition-hoist; and of 
the gun's crew, who "all did very well" 
under rifle and small-gun fire "at a range of 
about ten yards." But she never says what 
she really said about her motors. 

A Brawl at a Pier 

Now we will take E 14 on various work, 
either alone or as flagship of a squadron com- 



132 SEA WARFARE 

posed of herself and Lieutenant-Commander 
Nasmith's boat, E 11. Hers was a busy 
midsummer, and she came to be intimate 
with all sort of craft — such as the two-fun- 
nelled gunboat off Sar Kioi, who " fired at us, 
and missed as usual"; hospital ships going- 
back and forth unmolested to Constanti- 
nople; "the gunboat which fired at me on 
Sunday," and other old friends, afloat and 
ashore. 

When the crew of the Turkish brigantine 
full of stores got into their boats by request, 
and then "all stood up and cursed us," E 14 
did not lose her temper, even though it was 
too rough to lie alongside the abandoned 
ship. She told Acting Lieutenant R. W. 
Lawrence, of the Royal Naval Reserve, to 
swim off to her, which he did, and after a 
"cursory search" — Who can be expected to 
Sherlock Holmes for hours with nothing on? 
— set fire to her "with the aid of her own 
matches and paraffin oil." 

Then E 14 had a brawl with a steamer 
with a yellow funnel, blue top and black 
band, lying at a pier among dhows. The 



TALES OF "THE TRADE" 133 

shore took a hand in the game with small 
guns and rifles, and, as E 14 manoeuvred 
about the roadstead "as requisite" there 
was a sudden unaccountable explosion which 
strained her very badly. "I think," she 
muses, "I must have caught the moorings 
of a mine with my tail as I was turning, 
and exploded it. It is possible that it might 
have been a big shell bursting over us, but 
I think this unlikely, as we were 30 feet 
at the time." She is always a philosophical 
boat, anxious to arrive at the reason of 
facts, and when the game is against her 
she admits it freely. 

There was nondescript craft of a few 
hundred tons, who "at a distance did not 
look very warlike," but when chased sud- 
denly played a couple of six-pounders and 
"got off two dozen rounds at us before we 
were under. Some of them were only about 
20 yards off." And when a wily steamer, 
after sidling along the shore, lay up in front 
of a town she became "indistinguishable 
from the houses," and so was safe because 
we do not lowestrafe open towns. 



134 SEA WARFARE 

Sailing dhows full of grain had to be 
destroyed. At one rendezvous, while wait- 
ing for E 11, E 14 dealt with three such 
cases and then "towed the crews inshore 
and gave them biscuits, beef, and rum and 
water, as they were rather wet." Passenger 
steamers were allowed to proceed, because 
they were "full of people of both sexes," 
which is an unkultured way of doing 
business. 

Here is another instance of our insular 
type of mind. An empty dhow is passed 
which E 14 was going to leave alone, but 
it occurs to her that the boat looks "rather 
deserted," and she fancies she sees two heads 
in the water. So she goes back half a mile, 
picks up a couple of badly exhausted men, 
frightened out of their wits, gives them 
food and drink, and puts them aboard 
their property. Crews that jump over- 
board have to be picked up, even if, as 
happened in one case, there are twenty of 
them and one of them is a German bank 
manager taking a quantity of money to the 
Chanak Bank. Hospital ships are carefully 



TALES OF "THE TRADE" 135 

looked over as they come and go, and are 
left to their own devices; but they are 
rather a nuisance because they force E 14 
and others to dive for them when engaged 
in stalking warrantable game. There were 
a good many hospital ships, and as far as 
we can make out they all played fair. 
Ell boarded one and "reported everything 
satisfactory." 

Strange Messmates 

A layman cannot tell from the reports 
which of the duties demanded the most 
work — whether the continuous clearing out 
of transports, dhows, and sailing ships, 
generally found close to the well-gunned 
and attentive beach, or the equally con- 
tinuous attacks on armed vessels of every 
kind. Whatever else might be going on, 
there was always the problem how to 
arrange for the crews of sunk ships. If a 
dhow has no small boats, and you cannot 
find one handy, you have to take the crew 
aboard, where they are horribly in the way, 



136 SEA WARFARE 

and add to the oppressiveness of the atmo- 
sphere — like "the nine people, including 
two very old men," whom E 14 made 
honorary members of her mess for several 
hours till she could put them ashore after 
dark. Oddly enough she "could not get 
anything out of them." Imagine nine 
bewildered Moslems suddenly decanted into 
the reeking clamorous bowels of a fabric 
obviously built by Shaitan himself, and 
surrounded by — but our people are people 
of the Book and not dog-eating Kaffirs, and 
I will wager a great deal that that little 
company went ashore in better heart and 
stomach than when they were passed down 
the conning- tower hatch. 

Then there were queer amphibious battles 
with troops who had to be shelled as 
they marched towards Gallipoli along the 
coast roads. E 14 went out with E 11 on 
this job, early one morning, each boat taking 
her chosen section of landscape. Thrice 
E 14 rose to fire, thinking she saw the dust 
of feet, but "each time it turned out to be 
bullocks." When the shelling was ended 



TALES OF "THE TRADE" 137 

"I think the troops marching along that 
road must have been delayed and a good 
many killed." The Turks got up a field- 
gun in the course of the afternoon — your 
true believer never hurries — which out- 
ranged both boats, and they left accordingly. 
The next day she changed billets with 
E 11, who had the luck to pick up and put 
down a battleship close to Gallipoli. It 
turned out to be the Barbarossa. Mean- 
time E 14 got a 5000-ton supply ship, and 
later had to burn a sailing ship loaded with 
200 bales of leaf and cut tobacco — Turkish 
tobacco! Small wonder that E 11 "came 
alongside that afternoon and remained for 
an hour" — probably making cigarettes. 

Refitting under Difficulties 

Then E 14 went back to her base. She 
had a hellish time among the Dardanelles 
nets; was, of course, fired at by the forts, 
just missed a torpedo from the beach, scraped 
a mine, and when she had time to take stock 
found electric mine-wires twisted round her 



138 SEA WARFARE 

propellers and all her hull scraped and scored 
with wire marks. But that, again, was only 
in the day's work. The point she insisted 
upon was that she had been for seventy days 
in the Sea of Marmora with no securer base 
for refit than the centre of the same, and 
during all that while she had not had "any 
engine-room defect which has not been put 
right by the engine-room staff of the boat." 
The commander and the third officer went 
sick for a while; the first lieutenant got 
gastro-enteritis and was in bed (if you could 
see that bed!) "for the remainder of our 
stay in the Sea of Marmora," but "this boat 
has never been out of running order." The 
credit is ascribed to "the excellence of my 
chief engine-room artificer, James Hollier 
Hague, O.N. 227715," whose name is duly 
submitted to the authorities "for your 
consideration for advancement to the rank 
of warrant officer." 

Seventy days of every conceivable sort 
of risk, within and without, in a boat which 
is all engine-room, except where she is sick- 
bay; twelve thousand miles covered since 



TALES OF "THE TRADE" 139 

last overhaul and "never out of running 
order " — thanks to Mr. Hague. Such artists 
as he are the kind of engine-room artificers 
that commanders intrigue to get hold of — 
each for his own boat — and when the tales 
are told in the Trade, their names, like Abou 
Ben Adhem's, lead all the rest. 

I do not know the exact line of demarca- 
tion between engine-room and gunnery re- 
pairs, but I imagine it is faint and fluid. 
E 11, for example, while she was helping 
E 14 to shell a beached steamer, smashed 
half her gun-mounting, "the gun-layer being 
thrown overboard, and the gun nearly follow- 
ing him." However, the mischief was re- 
paired in the next twenty -four hours, which, 
considering the very limited deck space of a 
submarine, means that all hands must have 
been moderately busy. One hopes that 
they had not to dive often during the job. 

But worse is to come. E 2 (Commander 
D. Stocks) carried an externally mounted 
gun which, while she was diving up the 
Dardanelles on business, got hung up in the 
wires and stays of a net. She saw them 



140 SEA WARFARE 

through the conning-tower scuttles at a 
depth of 80 ft. — one wire hawser round the 
gun, another round the conning-tower, and 
so on. There was a continuous crackling of 
small explosions overhead which she thought 
were charges aimed at her by the guard-boats 
who watch the nets. She considered her po- 
sition for a while, backed, got up steam, 
barged ahead, and shore through the whole 
affair in one wild surge. Imagine the roof 
of a navigable cottage after it has snapped 
telegraph lines with its chimney, and you 
will get a small idea of what happens to the 
hull of a submarine when she uses her gun to 
break wire hawsers with. 



Trouble with a Gun 

E 2 was a wet, strained, and uncomfort- 
able boat for the rest of her cruise. She 
sank steamers, burned dhows; was worried 
by torpedo-boats and hunted by Hun planes ; 
hit bottom freely and frequently; silenced 
forts that fired at her from lonely beaches; 
warned villages who might have joined in 



TALES OF "THE TRADE" 141 

the game that they had better keep to farm- 
ing; shelled railway lines and stations; 
would have shelled a pier, but found there 
was a hospital built at one end of it, "so 
could not bombard"; came upon dhows 
crowded with "female refugees" which she 
"allowed to proceed," and was presented 
with fowls in return; but through it all her 
chief preoccupation was that racked and 
strained gun and mounting. When there 
was nothing else doing she reports sourly 
that she " worked on gun." As a philosopher 
of the lower deck put it: "Tisn't what 
you blanky do that matters, it's what you 
blanky have to do." In other words, worry, 
not work, kills. 

E 2's gun did its best to knock the heart 
out of them all. She had to shift the 
wretched thing twice; once because the bolts 
that held it down were smashed (the wire 
hawser must have pretty well pulled it off 
its seat), and again because the hull beneath 
it leaked on pressure. She went down to 
make sure of it. But she drilled and tapped 
and adjusted, till in a short time the gun 



142 SEA WARFARE 

worked again and killed steamers as it should. 
Meanwhile, the whole boat leaked. All the 
plates under the old gun-position forward 
leaked; she leaked aft through damaged 
hydroplane guards, and on her way home 
they had to keep the water down by hand 
pumps while she was diving through the 
nets. Where she did not leak outside she 
leaked internally, tank leaking into tank, 
so that the petrol got into the main fresh- 
water supply and the men had to be put on 
allowance. The last pint was served out 
when she was in the narrowest part of the 
Narrows, a place where one's mouth may 
well go dry of a sudden. 

Here for the moment the records end. I 
have been at some pains not to pick and 
choose among them. So far from doctoring 
or heightening any of the incidents, I have 
rather understated them; but I hope I have 
made it clear that through all the haste and 
fury of these multiplied actions, when life 
and death and destruction turned on the 
twitch of a finger, not one life of any non- 
combatant was wittingly taken. They were 



TALES OF "THE TRADE" 143 

carefully picked up or picked out, taken 
below, transferred to boats, and despatched 
or personally conducted in the intervals of 
business to the safe, unexploding beach. 
Sometimes they part from their chaperones 
"with many expressions of good will," at 
others they seem greatly relieved and rather 
surprised at not being knocked on the head 
after the custom of their Allies. But the 
boats with a hundred things on their minds 
no more take credit for their humanity than 
their commanders explain the feats for which 
they won their respective decorations. 



DESTROYERS AT JUTLAND 

(1916) 



"Have you news of my boy Jack?" 

Not this tide. 
"When d'you think that he'll come back?" 
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide. 

"Has any one else had word of him?" 

Not this tide. 
For what is sunk will hardly swim, 

Not with this wind blowing and this tide. 

"Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?" 

None this tide, 

Nor any tide, 
Except he didnt shame his hind 

Not even with that wind blowing and 
that tide. 

Then hold your head up all the more, 

This tide, 

And every tide, 
Because he was the son you bore, 

And gave to that wind blowing and that 
tide ! 

147 



STORIES OF THE BATTLE 

Cripple and Paralytic 

There was much destroyer-work in the 
Battle of Jutland. The actual battle field 
may not have been more than twenty 
thousand square miles, but the incidental 
patrols, from first to last, must have covered 
many times that area. Doubtless the next 
generation will comb out every detail of 
it. All we need remember is there were 
many squadrons of battleships and cruisers 
engaged over the face of the North Sea, 
and that they were accompanied in their 
dread comings and goings by multitudes of 
destroyers, who attacked the enemy both by 
day and by night from the afternoon of 
May 31 to the morning of June 1, 1916. 

149 



150 SEA WARFARE 

We are too close to the gigantic canvas 
to take in the meaning of the picture; our 
children stepping backward through the 
years may get the true perspective and 
proportions. 

To recapitulate what every one knows. 

The German fleet came out of its North 
Sea ports, scouting ships ahead; then de- 
stroyers, cruisers, battle-cruisers, and, last, 
the main battle-fleet in the rear. It moved 
north, parallel with the coast of stolen 
Schleswig-Holstein and Jutland. Our fleets 
were already out; the main battle fleet 
(Admiral Jellicoe) sweeping down from the 
north, and our battle-cruiser fleet (Admiral 
Beatty) feeling for the enemy. Our scouts 
came in contact with the enemy on the 
afternoon of May 31 about 100 miles off 
the Jutland coast, steering north-west. 
They satisfied themselves he was in strength, 
and reported accordingly to our battle-cruiser 
fleet, which engaged the enemy's battle- 
cruisers at about half -past three o'clock. 
The enemy steered south-east to rejoin their 
own fleet, which was coming up from that 



DESTROYERS AT JUTLAND 151 

quarter. We fought him on a parallel 
course as he ran for more than an hour. 

Then his battle-fleet came in sight, and 
Beatty's fleet went about and steered north- 
west in order to retire on our battle-fleet, 
which was hurrying down from the north. 
We returned fighting very much over the 
same waters as we had used in our slant 
south. The enemy up till now had lain to 
the eastward of us, whereby he had the 
advantage in that thick weather of seeing 
our hulls clear against the afternoon light, 
while he himself worked in the mists. We 
then steered a little to the north-west bear- 
ing him off towards the east till at six o'clock 
Beatty had headed the enemy's leading 
ships and our main battle-fleet came in sight 
from the north. The enemy broke back in 
a loop, first eastward, then south, then south- 
west as our fleet edged him off from the 
land, and our main battle-fleet, coming up 
behind them, followed in their wake. Thus 
for a while we had the enemy to westward 
of us, where he made a better mark; but the 
day was closing and the weather thickened, 



152 SEA WARFARE 

and the enemy wanted to get away. At a 
quarter past eight the enemy, still heading 
south-west, was covered by his destroyers 
in a great screen of grey smoke, and he got 
away. 

Night and Morning 

As darkness fell, our fleets lay between 
the enemy and his home ports. During the 
night our heavy ships, keeping well clear of 
possible mine-fields, swept down south to 
south and west of the Horns Reef, so that 
they might pick him up in the morning. 
When morning came our main fleet could 
find no trace of the enemy to the southward, 
but our destroyer-flotillas further north 
had been very busy with enemy ships, 
apparently running for the Horns Reef 
Channel. It looks, then, as if when we lost 
sight of the enemy in the smoke screen and 
the darkness he had changed course and 
broken for home astern our main fleets. 
And whether that was a sound manoeuvre 
or otherwise, he and the still flows of the 
North Sea alone can tell. 



DESTROYERS AT JUTLAND 153 

But how is a layman to give any coherent 
account of an affair where a whole country's 
coast-line was background to battle covering- 
geographical degrees? The records give an 
impression of illimitable grey waters, nicked 
on their uncertain horizons with the smudge 
and blur of ships sparkling with fury against 
ships hidden under the curve of the world. 
One sees these distances maddeningly ob- 
scured by walking mists and weak fogs, or 
wiped out by layers of funnel and gun smoke, 
and realises how, at the pace the ships 
were going, anything might be stumbled up- 
on in the haze or charge out of it when it 
lifted. One comprehends, too, how the far- 
off glare of a great vessel afire might be 
reported as a local fire on a near-by enemy, 
or vice versa; how a silhouette caught, for an 
instant, in a shaft of pale light let down 
from the low sky might be fatally difficult 
to identify till too late. But add to all 
these inevitable confusions and misreckon- 
ings of time, shape, and distance, charges 
at every angle of squadrons through and 
across other squadrons; sudden shifts of the 



154 SEA WARFARE 

centres of the fights, and even swifter 
restorations; wheelings, sweepings, and re- 
groupments such as accompany the passage 
across space of colliding universes. Then 
blanket the whole inferno with the darkness 
of night at full speed, and — see what you 
can make of it. 

Three Destroyers 

A little time after the action began to 
heat up between our battle-cruisers and 
the enemy's, eight or ten of our destroyers 
opened the ball for their branch of the 
service by breaking up the attack of an 
enemy light cruiser and fifteen destroyers. 
Of these they accounted for at least two 
destroyers — some think more — and drove 
the others back on their battle-cruisers. 
This scattered that fight a good deal over 
the sea. Three of our destroyers held on 
for the enemy's battle-fleet, who came 
down on them at ranges which eventually 
grew less than 3000 yards. Our people 
ought to have been lifted off the seas 
bodily, but they managed to fire a couple 



DESTROYERS AT JUTLAND 155 

of torpedoes apiece while the range was 
diminishing. They had no illusions. Says 
one of the three, speaking of her second 
shot, which she loosed at fairly close range, 
"This torpedo was fired because it was con- 
sidered very unlikely that the ship would 
escape disablement before another oppor- 
tunity offered." But still they lived — three 
destroyers against all a battle-cruiser fleet's 
quick-firers, as well as the fire of a batch 
of enemy destroyers at 600 yards. And they 
were thankful for small mercies. "The 
position being favourable," a third torpedo 
was fired from each while they yet floated. 

At 2500 yards, one destroyer was hit 
somewhere in the vitals and swerved badly 
across her next astern, who "was obliged to 
alter course to avoid a collision, thereby fail- 
ing to fire a fourth torpedo. ' ' Then that next 
astern "observed signal for destroyers' re- 
call," and went back to report to her flotilla 
captain — alone. Of her two companions, 
one was "badly hit and remained stopped 
between the lines." The other "remained 
stopped, but was afloat when last seen." 



156 SEA WARFARE 

Ships that "remain stopped" are liable to 
be rammed or sunk by methodical gun-fire. 
That was, perhaps, fifty minutes' work put 
in before there was any really vicious "edge" 
to the action, and it did not steady the 
nerves of the enemy battle-cruisers any 
more than another attack made by another 
detachment of ours. 

"What does one do when one passes a 
ship that 'remains stopped'?" I asked of a 
youth who had had experience. 

"Nothing special. They cheer, and you 
cheer back. One doesn't think about it 
till afterwards. You see, it may be your 
luck in another minute." 

Luck 

There were many other torpedo attacks 
in all parts of the battle that misty after- 
noon, including a quaint episode of an 
enemy light cruiser who "looked as if she 
were trying" to torpedo one of our battle- 
cruisers while the latter was particularly 
engaged. A destroyer of ours, returning 



DESTROYERS AT JUTLAND 157 

from a special job which required delicacy, 
was picking her way back at 30 knots 
through batches of enemy battle-cruisers 
and light cruisers with the idea of attaching 
herself to the nearest destroyer-flotilla and 
making herself useful. It occurred to her 
that as she "was in a most advantageous 
position for repelling enemy's destroyers 
endeavouring to attack, she could not do 
better than to remain on the 'engaged 
bow' of our battle-cruiser." So she re- 
mained and considered things. 

There was an enemy battle-cruiser squad- 
ron in the offing; with several enemy 
light cruisers ahead of that squadron, and 
the weather was thickish and deceptive. 
She sighted the enemy light cruiser, "class 
uncertain," only a few thousand yards away, 
and "decided to attack her in order to 
frustrate her firing torpedoes at our battle- 
fleet." (This in case the authorities should 
think that light cruiser wished to buy 
rubber.) So she fell upon the light cruiser 
with every gun she had, at between two 
and four thousand yards, and secured a 



158 SEA WARFARE 

number of hits, just the same as at target 
practice. While thus occupied she sighted 
out of the mist a squadron of enemy battle- 
cruisers that had worried her earlier in the 
afternoon. Leaving the light cruiser, she 
closed to what she considered a reasonable 
distance of the newcomers, and let them 
have, as she thought, both her torpedoes. 
She possessed an active acting sub-lieu- 
tenant, who, though officers of that rank 
think otherwise, is not very far removed 
from an ordinary midshipman of the type 
one sees in tow of relatives at the Army 
and Navy Stores. He sat astride one of 
the tubes to make quite sure things were 
in order, and fired when the sights came on. 
But, at that very moment, a big shell 
hit the destroyer on the side and there 
was a tremendous escape of steam. Believ- 
ing — since she had seen one torpedo leave 
the tube before the smash came — believing 
that both her tubes had been fired, the 
destroyer turned away "at greatly reduced 
speed" (the shell reduced it), and passed, 
quite reasonably close, the light cruiser 



DESTROYERS AT JUTLAND 159 

whom she had been hammering so faithfully 
till the larger game appeared. Meantime, 
the sub-lieutenant was exploring what 
damage had been done by the big shell. 
He discovered that only one of the two 
torpedoes had left the tubes, and "observing 
enemy light cruiser beam on and apparently 
temporarily stopped," he fired the provi- 
dential remainder at her, and it hit her 
below the conning-tower and well and truly 
exploded, as was witnessed by the sub- 
lieutenant himself, the commander, a 
leading signalman, and several other ratings. 
Luck continued to hold! The acting sub- 
lieutenant further reported that "we still 
had three torpedoes left and at the same 
time drew my attention to enemy's line 
of battleships." They rather looked as if 
they were coming down with intent to 
assault. So the sub-lieutenant fired the 
rest of the torpedoes, which at least started 
off correctly from the shell-shaken tubes, 
and must have crossed the enemy's line. 
When torpedoes turn up among a squadron, 
they upset the steering and distract the 



160 SEA WARFARE 

attention of all concerned. Then the de- 
stroyer judged it time to take stock of her 
injuries. Among other minor defects she 
could neither steam, steer, nor signal. 



Towing under Difficulties 

Mark how virtue is rewarded! Another 
of our destroyers an hour or so previously 
had been knocked clean out of action, 
before she had done anything, by a big shell 
which gutted a boiler-room and started an 
oil fire. (That is the drawback to oil.) 
She crawled out between the battleships till 
she "reached an area of comparative calm" 
and repaired damage. She says: "The fire 
having been dealt with it was found a mat 
kept the stokehold dry. My only trouble 
now being lack of speed, I looked round for 
useful employment, and saw a destroyer 
in great difficulties, so closed her." That 
destroyer was our paralytic friend of the 
intermittent torpedo-tubes, and a grateful 
ship she was when her crippled sister (but 
still good for a few knots) offered her a 



DESTROYERS AT JUTLAND 161 

tow, "under very trying conditions with 
large enemy ships approaching." So the 
two set off together, Cripple and Paralytic, 
with heavy shells falling round them, as 
sociable as a couple of lame hounds. Cripple 
worked up to 12 knots, and the weather 
grew vile, and the tow parted. Paralytic, 
by this time, had raised steam in a boiler or 
two, and made shift to get along slowly on 
her own, Cripple hirpling beside her, till 
Paralytic could not make any more headway 
in that rising sea, and Cripple had to tow 
her once more. Once more the tow parted. 
So they tied Paralytic up rudely and effect- 
ively with a cable round her after bollards 
and gun (presumably because of strained 
forward bulkheads) and hauled her stern- 
first, through heavy seas, at continually 
reduced speeds, doubtful of their position, 
unable to sound because of the seas, and 
much pestered by a wind which backed 
without warning, till, at last, they made 
land, and turned into the hospital appointed 
for brave wounded ships. Everybody 
speaks well of Cripple. Her name crops 



162 SEA WARFARE 

up in several reports, with such compli- 
ments as the men of the sea use when they 
see good work. She herself speaks well of 
her lieutenant, who, as executive officer, 
"took charge of the fire and towing arrange- 
ments in a very creditable manner," and also 
of Tom Battye and Thomas Kerr, engine- 
room artificer and stoker petty officer, who 
"were in the stokehold at the time of the 
shell striking, and performed cool and 
prompt decisive action, although both suf- 
fering from shock and slight injuries." 

Useful Employment 

Have you ever noticed that men who 
do Homeric deeds often describe them in 
Homeric language? The sentence "I looked 
round for useful employment" is worthy 
of Ulysses when "there was an evil sound 
at the ships of men who perished and of 
the ships themselves broken at the same 
time." 

Roughly, very roughly, speaking, our 
destroyers enjoyed three phases of "prompt 



DESTROYERS AT JUTLAND 163 

decisive action" — the first, a period of day- 
light attacks (from 4 to 6 p. m.) such as 
the one I have just described, while the 
battle was young and the light fairly good 
on the afternoon of May 31; the second, 
towards dark, when the light had lessened 
and the enemy were more uneasy, and, I 
think, in more scattered formation; the 
third, when darkness had fallen, and the 
destroyers had been strung out astern with 
orders to help the enemy home, which they 
did all night as opportunity offered. One 
cannot say whether the day or the night 
work was the more desperate. From private 
advices, the young gentlemen concerned 
seem to have functioned with efficiency 
either way. As one of them said: "After 
a bit, you see, we were all pretty much on 
our own, and you could really find out what 
your ship could do." 

I will tell you later of a piece of night 
work not without merit. 



II 

THE NIGHT HUNT 

Hamming an Enemy Cruiser 

As I said, we will confine ourselves to 
something quite sane and simple which 
does not involve more than half-a-dozen 
different reports. 

When the German fleet ran for home, 
on the night of May 31, it seems to have 
scattered — "starred," I believe, is the word 
for the evolution — in a general sauve qui 
peut, while the Devil, livelily represented 
by our destroyers, took the hindmost. 
Our flotillas were strung out far and wide 
on this job. One man compared it to 
hounds hunting half a hundred separate 
foxes. 

I take the adventures of several couples 

165 



166 SEA WARFARE 

of destroyers who, on the night of May 31 > 
were nosing along somewhere towards the 
Schleswig-Holstein coast, ready to chop 
any Hun-stuff coming back to earth by 
that particular road. The leader of one 
line was Gehenna, and the next two ships 
astern of her were Eblis and Shaitan, in the 
order given. There were others, of course, 
but with the exception of one Goblin they 
don't come violently into this tale. There 
had been a good deal of promiscuous firing 
that evening, and actions were going on all 
round. Towards midnight our destroyers 
were overtaken by several three- and four- 
funnel German ships (cruisers they thought) 
hurrying home. At this stage of the game 
anybody might have been anybody — pur- 
suer or pursued. The Germans took no 
chances, but switched on their searchlights 
and opened fire on Gehenna. Her acting 
sub-lieutenant reports: "A salvo hit us 
forward. I opened fire with the after-guns. 
A shell then struck us in a steam-pipe, and I 
could see nothing but steam. But both 
starboard torpedo-tubes were fired." 



DESTROYERS AT JUTLAND 167 

Eblis, Gehenna's next astern, at once 
fired a torpedo at the second ship in the 
German line, a four-funnelled cruiser, and 
hit her between the second funnel and the 
mainmast, when "she appeared to catch 
fire fore and aft simultaneously, heeled 
right over to starboard, and undoubtedly 
sank." Eblis loosed off a second torpedo 
and turned aside to reload, firing at the 
same time to distract the enemy's attention 
from Gehenna, who was now ablaze fore 
and aft. Gehenna's acting sub-lieutenant 
(the only executive officer who survived) 
says that by the time the steam from the 
broken pipe cleared he found Gehenna 
stopped, nearly everybody amidships killed 
or wounded, the cartridge-boxes round the 
guns exploding one after the other as the 
fires took hold, and the enemy not to be 
seen. Three minutes or less did all that 
damage. Eblis had nearly finished reload- 
ing when a shot struck the davit that was 
swinging her last torpedo into the tube and 
wounded all hands concerned. Thereupon 
she dropped torpedo work, fired at an enemy 



168 SEA WARFARE 

searchlight which winked and went out, and 
was closing in to help Gehenna when she 
found herself under the noses of a couple of 
enemy cruisers. " The nearer one," he says, 
" altered course to ram me apparently." 
The Senior Service writes in curiously 
lawyer-like fashion, but there is no denying 
that they act quite directly. "I therefore 
put my helm hard aport and the two ships 
met and rammed each other, port bow to 
port bow." There could have been no time 
to think and, for Eblis's commander on the 
bridge, none to gather information. But 
he had observant subordinates, and he 
writes — and I would humbly suggest that 
the words be made the ship's motto for 
evermore — he writes, "Those aft noted" 
that the enemy cruiser had certain marks 
on her funnel and certain arrangements of 
derricks on each side which, quite apart 
from the evidence she left behind her, 
betrayed her class. Eblis and she met. 
Says Eblis: "I consider I must have con- 
siderably damaged this cruiser, as 20 feet 
of her side plating was left in my foc'sle." 



DESTROYERS AT JUTLAND 169 

Twenty feet of ragged rivet-slinging steel, 
razoring and reaping about in the dark on 
a foc'sle that had collapsed like a concertina ! 
It was very fair plating too. There were 
side-scuttle holes in it — what we passengers 
would call portholes. But it might have 
been better, for Eblis reports sorrowfully, 
"by the thickness of the coats of paint 
(duly given in 32nds of the inch) she would 
not appear to have been a very new ship." 

A Fugitive on Fire 

New or old, the enemy had 'done her 
best. She had completely demolished 
Eblis's bridge and searchlight platform, 
brought down the mast and the fore-funnel, 
ruined the whaler and the dinghy, split the 
foc'sle open above water from the stem to 
the galley which is abaft the bridge, and 
below water had opened it up from the 
stem to the second bulkhead. She had 
further ripped off Eblis's skin-plating for 
an amazing number of yards on one side 
of her, and had fired a couple of large- 



170 SEA WARFARE 

calibre shells into Eblis at point-blank 
range, narrowly missing her vitals. Even 
so, Eblis is as impartial as a prize-court. 
She reports that the second shot, a trifle 
of eight inches, "may have been fired at a 
different time or just after colliding." But 
the night was yet young, and "just after 
getting clear of this cruiser an enemy battle- 
cruiser grazed past our stern at high speed" 
and again the judgmatic mind — "I think 
she must have intended to ram us." She 
was a large three-funnelled thing, her centre 
funnel shot away and "lights were flicker- 
ing under her foc'sle as if she was on fire 
forward." Fancy the vision of her, hurtling 
out of the dark, red-lighted from within, and 
fleeing on like a man with his throat cut ! 

[As an interlude, all enemy cruisers that 
night were not keen on ramming. They 
wanted to get home. A man I know who 
was on another part of the drive saw a 
covey bolt through our destroyers; and 
had just settled himself for a shot at one of 
them when the night threw up a second 
bird coming down full speed on his other 



DESTROYERS AT JUTLAND 171 

beam. He had bare time to jink between 
the two as they whizzed past. One switched 
on her searchlight and fired a whole salvo 
at him point blank. The heavy stuff went 
between his funnels. She must have sighted 
along her own beam of light, which was 
about a thousand yards. 

"How did you feel?" I asked. 

"I was rather sick. It was my best 
chance all that night, and I had to miss it 
or be cut in two." 

"What happened to the cruisers?" 

"Oh, they went on, and I heard 'em 
being attended to by some of our fellows. 
They didn't know what they were doing, 
or they couldn't have missed me sitting, 
the way they did."] 

The Confidential Books 

After all that Eblis picked herself up, 
and discovered that she was still alive, with 
a dog's chance of getting to port. But she 
did not bank on it. That grand slam had 
wrecked the bridge, pinning the commander 



172 SEA WARFARE 

under the wreckage. By the time he had 
extricated himself he "considered it advisable 
to throw overboard the steel chest and dis- 
patch-box of confidential and secret books." 
These are never allowed to fall into strange 
hands, and their proper disposal is the last 
step but one in the ritual of the burial 
service of His Majesty's ships at sea. 
Gehenna, afire and sinking, out somewhere 
in the dark, was going through it on her 
own account. This is her acting sub- 
lieutenant's report: "The confidential 
books were got up. The first lieutenant 
gave the order: 'Every man aft,' and the 
confidential books were thrown overboard. 
The ship soon afterwards heeled over to 
starboard and the bows went under. The 
first lieutenant gave the order: 'Every- 
body for themselves.' The ship sank in 
about a minute, the stern going straight 
up into the air." 

But it was not written in the Book of 
Fate that stripped and battered Eblis 
should die that night as Gehenna died. 
After the burial of the books it was found 



DESTROYERS AT JUTLAND 173 

that the several fires on her were manage- 
able, that she "was not making water aft 
of the damage," which meant two-thirds of 
her were, more or less, in commission, and, 
best of all, that three boilers were usable in 
spite of the cruiser's shells. So she "shaped 
course and speed to make the least water 
and the most progress towards land." On 
the way back the wind shifted eight points 
without warning — it was this shift, if you 
remember, that so embarrassed Cripple and 
Paralytic on their homeward crawl — and, 
what with one thing and another, Eblis 
was unable to make port till the scanda- 
lously late hour of noon on June 2, "the 
mutual ramming having occurred about 
11 .40 p. m. on May 31." She says, this time 
without any legal reservation whatever, "I 
cannot speak too highly of the courage, 
discipline, and devotion of the officers and 
ship's company." 

Her recommendations are a Compendium 
of Godly Deeds for the Use of Mariners. 
They cover pretty much all that man may 
be expected to do. There was, as tjiere 



174 SEA WARFARE 

always is, a first lieutenant who, while his 
commander was being extricated from the 
bridge wreckage, took charge of affairs and 
steered the ship first from the engine-room, 
or what remained of it, and later from aft, 
and otherwise manoeuvred as requisite, 
among doubtful bulkheads. In his leisure 
he "improvised means of signalling," and if 
there be not one joyous story behind that 
smooth sentence I am a Hun ! 



The Art of Improvising 

They all improvised like the masters of 
craft they were. The chief engine-room 
artificer, after he had helped to put out fires, 
improvised stops to the gaps which were 
left by the carrying away of the forward 
funnel and mast. He got and kept up 
steam "to a much higher point than would 
have appeared at all possible," and when the 
sea rose, as it always does if you are in 
trouble, he "improvised pumping and 
drainage arrangements, thus allowing the 
ship to steam at a good speed on the whole." 



DESTROYERS AT JUTLAND 175 

There could not have been more than 40 
feet of hole. 

The surgeon — a probationer — performed 
an amputation single-handed in the wreckage 
by the bridge, and by his "wonderful skill, 
resource, and unceasing care and devotion 
undoubtedly saved the lives of the many 
seriously wounded men." That no horror 
might be lacking, there was "a short circuit 
among the bridge wreckage for a consider- 
able time." The searchlight and wireless 
were tangled up together, and the electricity 
leaked into everything. 

There were also three wise men who 
saved the ship whose names must not be 
forgotten. They were Chief Engine-room 
Artificer Lee, Stoker Petty Officer Gardiner, 
and Stoker Elvins When the funnel car- 
ried away it was touch and go whether 
the foremost boiler would not explode. 
These three "put on respirators and kept 
the fans going till all fumes, etc., were 
cleared away." To each man, you will 
observe, his own particular Hell which he 
entered of his own particular initiative. 



176 SEA WARFARE 

Lastly, there were the two remaining 
quartermasters — mutinous dogs, both of 
'em — one wounded in the right hand and 
the other in the left, who took the wheel 
between them all the way home, thus 
improvising one complete Navy-pattern 
quartermaster, and "refused to be relieved 
during the whole thirty-six hours before the 
ship returned to port." So Eblis passes out 
of the picture with "never a moan or com- 
plaint from a single wounded man, and in 
spite of the rough weather of June 1st they 
all remained cheery." They had one Hun 
cruiser, torpedoed, to their credit, and strong 
evidence abroad that they had knocked the 
end out of another. 

But Gehenna went down, and those of 
her crew who remained hung on to the rafts 
that destroyers carry till they were picked 
up about the dawn by Shaitan, third in the 
line, who, at that hour, was in no shape to 
give much help. Here is Shaitan's tale. 
She saw the unknown cruisers overtake the 
flotilla, saw their leader switch on search- 
lights and open fire as she drew abreast of 



DESTROYERS AT JUTLAND 177 

Gehenna, and at once fired a torpedo at the 
third German ship. Shaitan could not see 
Eblis, her next ahead, for, as we know, 
Eblis after firing her torpedoes had hauled 
off to reload. When the enemy switched 
his searchlights off Shaitan hauled out too. 
It is not wholesome for destroyers to keep 
on the same course within a thousand yards 
of big enemy cruisers. 

She picked up a destroyer of another 
division, Goblin, who for the moment had 
not been caught by the enemy's searchlights 
and had profited by this decent obscurity 
to fire a torpedo at the hindmost of the 
cruisers. Almost as Shaitan took station 
behind Goblin the latter was lighted up by a 
large ship and heavily fired at. The enemy 
fled, but she left Goblin out of control, 
with a grisly list of casualties, and her helm 
jammed. Goblin swerved, returned, and 
swerved again; Shaitan astern tried to clear 
her, and the two fell aboard each other, 
Goblin's bows deep in Shaitan's fore-bridge. 
While they hung thus, locked, an unknown 
destroyer rammed Shaitan aft, cutting off 



178 SEA WARFARE 

several feet of her stern and leaving her 
rudder jammed hard over. As complete a 
mess as the Personal Devil himself could 
have devised, and all due to the merest 
accident of a few panicky salvoes. Presently 
the two ' ships worked clear in a smother of 
steam and oil, and went their several ways. 
Quite a while after she had parted from 
Shaitan, Goblin discovered several of 
Shaitan's people, some of them wounded, 
on her own foc'sle, where they had been 
pitched by the collision. Goblin, working 
her way homeward on such boilers as 
remained, carried on a one-gun fight at a 
few cables' distance with some enemy 
destroyers, who, not knowing what state 
she was in, sheered off after a few rounds. 
Shaitan, holed forward and opened up aft, 
came across the survivors from Gehenna 
clinging to their raft, and took them aboard. 
Then some of our destroyers — they were 
thick on the sea that night — tried to tow 
her stern-first, for Goblin had cut her up 
badly forward. But, since Shaitan lacked 
any stern, and her rudder was jammed hard 



DESTROYERS AT JUTLAND 179 

across where the stern should have been, 
the hawsers parted, and, after leave asked of 
lawful authority, across all that waste of 
waters, they sank Shaitan by gun-fire, having 
first taken all the proper steps about the 
confidential books. Yet Shaitan had had 
her little crumb of comfort ere the end. 
While she lay crippled she saw quite close 
to her a German cruiser that was trailing 
homeward in the dawn gradually heel over 
and sink. 

This completes my version of the various 
accounts of the four destroyers directly 
concerned for a few hours, on one minute 
section of one wing of our battle. Other 
ships witnessed other aspects of the agony 
and duly noted them as they went about 
their business. One of our battleships, for 
instance, made out by the glare of burning 
Gehenna that the supposed cruiser that 
Eblis torpedoed was a German battleship 
of a certain class. So Gehenna did not die 
in vain, and we may take it that the dis- 
covery did not unduly depress Eblis's 
wounded in hospital. 



180 SEA WARFARE 

Asking for Trouble 

The rest of the flotilla that the four 
destroyers belong to had their own ad- 
ventures later. One of them, chasing or 
being chased, saw Goblin out of control just 
before Goblin and Shaitan locked, and 
narrowly escaped adding herself to that 
triple collision. Another loosed a couple of 
torpedoes at the enemy ships who were 
attacking Gehenna, which, perhaps, ac- 
counts for the anxiety of the enemy to break 
away from that hornets' nest as soon as pos- 
sible. Half a dozen or so of them ran into 
four German battleships, which they set 
about torpedoing at ranges varying from 
half a mile to a mile and a half. It was ask- 
ing for trouble and they got it; but they got 
in return at least one big ship, and the same 
observant battleship of ours who identified 
Eblis's bird reported three satisfactory ex- 
plosions in half an hour, followed by a glare 
that lit up all the sky. One of the flotilla, 
closing on what she thought was the smoke 
of a sister in difficulties, found herself well 



DESTROYERS AT JUTLAND 181 

in among the four battleships. "It was too 
late to get away," she says, so she attacked, 
fired her torpedo, was caught up in the 
glare of a couple of searchlights, and 
pounded to pieces in five minutes, not even 
her rafts being left. She went down with 
her colours flying, having fought to the last 
available gun. 

Another destroyer who had borne a hand 
in Gehenna's trouble had her try at the four 
battleships and got in a torpedo at 800 yards. 
She saw it explode and the ship take a 
heavy list. "Then I was chased," which is 
not surprising. She picked up a friend who 
could only do 20 knots. They sighted 
several Hun destroyers who fled from them; 
then dropped on to four Hun destroyers 
all together, who made great parade of 
commencing action, but soon afterwards 
"thought better of it, and turned away." 
So you see, in that flotilla alone there was 
every variety of fight, from the ordered 
attacks of squadrons under control, to single 
ship affairs, every turn of which depended 
on the second's decision of the men con- 



182 SEA WARFARE 

cerned; endurance to the hopeless end; 
bluff and cunning; reckless advance and 
red-hot flight; clear vision and as much of 
blank bewilderment as the Senior Service 
permits its children to indulge in. That is 
not much. When a destroyer who has been 
dodging enemy torpedoes and gun-fire in 
the dark realises about midnight that she is 
"following a strange British flotilla, having 
lost sight of my own," she "decides to 
remain with them," and shares their for- 
tunes and whatever language is going. 

If lost hounds could speak when they 
cast up next day, after an unchecked night 
among the wild life of the dark, they would 
talk much as our destroyers do. 



The doorkeepers of Zion, 

They do not always stand 
In helmet and whole armour, 

With halberds in their hand; 
But, being sure of Zion, 

And all her mysteries, 
They rest awhile in Zion, 
Sit down and smile in Zion; 
Ay, even jest in Zion, 

In Zion, at their ease. 

The gatekeepers of Baal, 

They dare not sit or lean, 
But fume and fret and posture 

And foam and curse between; 
For being bound to Baal, 

Whose sacrifice is vain, 
Their rest is scant with Baal, 
They glare and pant for Baal, 
They mouth and rant for Baal, 

For Baal in their pain. 

188 



184 SEA WARFARE 

But we will go to Zion, 

By choice and not through dread, 
With these our present comrades 

And those our present dead; 
And, being free of Zion 

In both her fellowships, 
Sit down and sup in Zion — 
Stand up and drink in Zion 
Whatever cup in Zion 

Is offered to our lips ! 



Ill 

THE MEANING OF "JOSS" 

A Young Officer's Letter 

As one digs deeper into the records, one 
sees the various temperaments of men re- 
vealing themselves through all the formal 
wording. One commander may be an ex- 
pert in torpedo-work, whose first care is how 
and where his shots went, and whether, 
under all circumstances of pace, light, and 
angle, the best had been achieved. De- 
stroyers do not carry unlimited stocks of tor- 
pedoes. It rests with commanders whether 
they shall spend with a free hand at first or 
save for night-work ahead — risk a possible 
while he is yet afloat, or hang on coldly for 
a certainty. So in the old whaling days did 
the harponeer bring up or back off his boat 

185 



186 SEA WARFARE 

till some shift of the great fish's bulk gave 
him sure opening at the deep-seated life. 

And then comes the question of private 
judgment. "I thought so-and-so would 
happen. Therefore, I did thus and thus." 
Things may or may not turn out as antici- 
pated, but that is merely another of the 
million chances of the sea. Take a case in 
point. A flotilla of our destroyers sighted 
six (there had been eight the previous after- 
noon) German battleships of Kingly and Im- 
perial caste very early in the morning of the 
1st June, and duly attacked. At first our 
people ran parallel to the enemy, then, as 
far as one can make out, headed them and 
swept round sharp to the left, firing tor- 
pedoes from their port or left-hand tubes. 
Between them they hit a battleship, which 
went up in flame and debris. But one of the 
flotilla had not turned with the rest. She 
had anticipated that the attack would be 
made on another quarter, and, for certain 
technical reasons, she was not ready. When 
she was, she turned, and single-handed — the 
rest of the flotilla having finished and gone 



DESTROYERS AT JUTLAND 187 

on — carried out two attacks on the five re- 
maining battleships. She got one of them 
amidships, causing a terrific explosion and 
flame above the masthead, which signifies 
that the magazine has been touched off. 
She counted the battleships when the smoke 
had cleared, and there were but four of them. 
She herself was not hit, though shots fell 
close. She went her way, and, seeing 
nothing of her sisters, picked up another 
flotilla and stayed with it till the end. Do 
I make clear the maze of blind hazard and 
wary judgment in which our men of the sea 
must move? 



Saved by a Smoke Screen 

Some of the original flotilla were chased 
and headed about by cruisers after their 
attack on the six battleships, and a single 
shell from battleship or cruiser reduced one 
of them to such a condition that she was 
brought home by her sub-lieutenant and a 
midshipman. Her captain, first lieutenant, 
gunner, torpedo coxswain, and both signal- 



188 SEA WARFARE 

men were either killed or wounded; the 
bridge, with charts, instruments, and signal- 
ling gear went; all torpedoes were expended; 
a gun was out of action, and the usual cordite 
fires developed. Luckily, the engines were 
workable. She escaped under cover of a 
smoke screen, which is an unbearably filthy 
outpouring of the densest smoke, made by 
increasing the proportion of oil to air in the 
furnace-feed. It rolls forth from the funnels 
looking solid enough to sit upon, spreads in 
a searchlight-proof pat of impenetrable 
beastliness, and in still weather hangs for 
hours. But it saved that ship. 

It is curious to note the subdued tone 
of a boy's report when by some accident of 
slaughter he is raised to command. There 
are certain formalities which every ship 
must comply with on entering certain ports. 
No fully-striped commander would trouble 
to detail them any more than he would the 
aspect of his Club porter. The young 'un 
puts it all down, as who should say: "I rang 
the bell, wiped my feet on the mat, and 
asked if they were at home.' , He is most 



DESTROYERS AT JUTLAND 189 

careful of the port proprieties, and since he 
will be sub. again to-morrow, and all his 
equals will tell him exactly how he ought 
to have handled her, he almost apologises 
for the steps he took — deeds which ashore 
might be called cool or daring. 

The Senior Service does not gush. 
There are certain formulae appropriate to 
every occasion. One of our destroyers, who 
was knocked out early in the day and 
lay helpless, was sighted by several of her 
companions. One of them reported her to 
the authorities, but, being busy at the time, 
said he did not think himself justified in 
hampering himself with a disabled ship in 
the middle of an action. It was not as if 
she was sinking either. She was only holed 
foreward and aft, with a bad hit in the en- 
gine-room, and her steering-gear knocked 
out. In this posture she cheered the passing 
ships, and set about repairing her hurts 
with good heart and a smiling countenance. 
She managed to get under some sort of 
way at midnight, and next day was taken 
in tow by a friend. She says officially, 



190 SEA WARFARE 

"his assistance was invaluable, as I had no 
oil left and met heavy weather." 

What actually happened was much less 
formal. Fleet destroyers, as a rule, do not 
worry about navigation. They take their 
orders from the flagship, and range out 
and return, on signal, like sheep-dogs whose 
fixed point is their shepherd. Consequently, 
when they break loose on their own they 
may fetch up rather doubtful of their where- 
abouts — as this injured one did. After she 
had been so kindly taken in tow, she in- 
quired of her friend ("Message captain to 
captain") — "Have you any notion where 
we are?" The friend replied, "I have not, 
but I will find out." So the friend waited 
on the sun with the necessary implements, 
which luckily had not been smashed, and in 
due time made: "Our observed position at 
this hour is thus and thus." The tow, ir- 
reverently, "Is it? 'Didn't know you were 
a navigator." The friend, with hauteur, 
"Yes; it's rather a hobby of mine." The 
tow, "Had no idea it was as bad as all 
that; but I'm afraid I'll have to trust you 



DESTROYERS AT JUTLAND 191 

this time. Go ahead, and be quick about 
it." They reached a port, correctly enough, 
but to this hour the tow, having studied 
with the friend at a place called Dartmouth, 
insists that it was pure Joss. 



Concerning Joss 

And Joss, which is luck, fortune, destiny, 
the irony of Fate or Nemesis, is the greatest 
of all the Battle-gods that move on the 
waters. As I will show you later, knowl- 
edge of gunnery and a delicate instinct for 
what is in the enemy's minds may enable 
a destroyer to thread her way, slowing, 
speeding, and twisting between the heavy 
salvoes of opposing fleets. As the dank- 
smelling waterspouts rise and break, she 
judges where the next grove of them will 
sprout. If her judgment is correct, she 
may enter it in her report as a little feather 
in her cap. But it is Joss when the 
stray 12-inch shell, hurled by a giant at 
some giant ten miles away, falls on her 
from Heaven and wipes out her and her 



192 SEA WARFARE 

profound calculations. This was seen to 
happen to a Hun destroyer in mid-attack. 
While she was being laboriously dealt with 
by a 4-inch gun something immense took 
her, and — she was not. 

Joss it is, too, when the cruiser's 8-inch 
shot, that should have raked out your 
innards from the forward boiler to the 
ward-room stove, deflects miraculously, like 
a twig dragged through deep water, and, 
almost returning on its track, skips off 
unbursten and leaves you reprieved by the 
breadth of a nail from three deaths in 
one. Later, a single splinter, no more, may 
cut your oil-supply pipes as dreadfully and 
completely as a broken wind-screen in a 
collision cuts the surprised motorist's throat. 
Then you must lie useless, fighting oil-fires 
while the precious fuel gutters away till 
you have to ask leave to escape while there 
are yet a few tons left. One ship who was 
once bled white by such a piece of Joss, 
suggested it would be better that oil-pipes 
should be led along certain lines which she 
sketched. As if that would make any 



DESTROYERS AT JUTLAND 193 

difference to Joss when he wants to show 
what he can do ! 

Our sea-people, who have worked with 
him for a thousand wettish years, have 
acquired something of Joss's large toleration 
and humour. He causes ships in thick 
weather, or under strain, to mistake friends 
for enemies. At such times, if your heart 
is full of highly organised hate, you strafe 
frightfully and efficiently till one of you 
perishes, and the survivor reports wonders 
which are duly wirelessed all over the world. 
But if you worship Joss, you reflect, you 
put two and two together in a casual insular 
way, and arrive — sometimes both parties 
arrive — at instinctive conclusions which 
avoid trouble. 



An Affair in the North Sea 

Witness this tale. It does not concern 
the Jutland fight, but another little affair 
which took place a while ago in the North 
Sea. It was understood that a certain 
type of cruiser of ours would not be taking 



194 SEA WARFARE 

part in a certain show. Therefore, if any- 
one saw cruisers very like them he might 
blaze at them with a clear conscience, 
for they would be Hun-boats. And one of 
our destroyers — thick weather as usual — 
spied the silhouettes of cruisers exactly like 
our own stealing across the haze. Said the 
commander to his sub., with an inflection 
neither period, exclamation, nor inter- 
rogation-mark can render — "That — is — 
them." 

Said the sub. in precisely the same tone 
— "That is them, sir." "As my sub.," 
said the commander, "your observation is 
strictly in accord with the traditions of the 
Service. Now, as man to man, what are 
they?" "We-el," said the sub., "since you 

put it that way, I'm d d if Fd fire." 

And they didn't, and they were quite right. 
The destroyer had been off on another job, 
and Joss had jammed the latest wireless 
orders to her at the last moment. But Joss 
had also put it into the hearts of the boys 
to save themselves and others. 

I hold no brief for the Hun, but honestly 



DESTROYERS AT JUTLAND 195 

I think he has not lied as much about the 
Jutland fight as people believe, and that 
when he protests he sank a ship, he did very 
completely sink a ship. I am the more con- 
firmed in this belief by a still small voice 
among the Jutland reports, musing aloud 
over an account of an unaccountable outly- 
ing brawl witnessed by one of our destroyers. 
The voice suggests that what the destroyer 
saw was one German ship being sunk by 
another. Amen ! 

Our destroyers saw a good deal that 
night on the face of the waters. Some of 
them who were working in "areas of com- 
parative calm" submit charts of their 
tangled courses, all studded with notes 
along the zigzag — something like this: — 

"8 p.m. — Heard explosion to the N.W." 
(A neat arrow-head points that way.) Half 
an inch farther along, a short change of 
course, and the word Hit explains the 
meaning of — "Sighted enemy cruiser engaged 
with destroyers." Another twist follows. 
" 9.30 p.m. — Passed wreckage. Engaged enemy 
destroyers port beam opposite courses." 



196 SEA WARFARE 

A long straight line without incident, 
then a tangle, and — " Picked up survivors of 
So-and-so." A stretch over to some ship 
that they were transferred to, a fresh 
departure, and another brush with "Single 
destroyer on parallel course. Hit. 0.7 a. m. 
— Passed bows enemy cruiser sticking up. 
0.18. — Joined flotilla for attack on battleship 
squadron." So it runs on — one little ship 
in a few short hours passing through more 
wonders of peril and accident than all the 
old fleets ever dreamed. 

A "Child's" Letter 

In years to come naval experts will 
collate all those diagrams, and furiously 
argue over them. A lot of the destroyer 
work was inevitably as mixed as bombing 
down a trench, as the scuffle of a polo match, 
or as the hot heaving heart of a football 
scrum. It is difficult to realise when one 
considers the size of the sea, that it is that 
very size and absence of boundary which 
helps the confusion. To give an idea, here is 



DESTROYERS AT JUTLAND 197 

a letter (it has been quoted before, I believe, 
but it is good enough to repeat many times), 
from a nineteen-year-old child to his friend 
aged seventeen (and minus one leg), in a 
hospital : 

"I'm so awfully sorry you weren't in it. 
It was rather terrible, but a wonderful 
experience, and I wouldn't have missed it 
for anything, but, by Jove, it isn't a thing 
one wants to make a habit of. 

"I must say it is very different from what 
I expected. I expected to be excited, but 
was not a bit. It's hard to express what 
we did feel like, but you know the sort of 
feeling one has when one goes in to bat at 
cricket, and rather a lot depends upon your 
doing well, and you are waiting for the 
first ball. Well, it's very much the same 
as that. Do you know what I mean? A 
sort of tense feeling, not quite knowing 
what to expect. One does not feel the 
slightest bit frightened, and the idea that 
there's a chance of you and your ship being 
scuppered does not enter one's head. There 
are too many other things to think about." 



198 SEA WARFARE 

Follows the usual "No ship like our 
ship" talkee, and a note of where she was 
at the time. 

"Then they ordered us to attack, so we 
bustled off full bore. Being navigator, also 
having control of all the guns, I was on the 
bridge all the time, and remained for twelve 
hours without leaving it at all. When we 
got fairly close I sighted a good-looking 
Hun destroyer, which I thought I'd like 
to strafe. You know, it's awful fun to 
know that you can blaze off at a real ship, 
and do as much damage as you like. Well, 
I'd just got their range on the guns, and 
we'd just fired one round, when some more 
of our destroyers coming from the opposite 
direction got between us and the enemy 
and completely blanketed us, so we had 
to stop, which was rather rot. Shortly 
afterwards they recalled us, so we bustled 
back again. How any destroyer got out 
of it is perfectly wonderful. 

"Literally there were hundreds of progs 
(shells falling) all round us, from a 15- 
inch to a 4-inch, and you know what a big 



DESTROYERS AT JUTLAND 199 

splash a 15-inch bursting in the water does 
make. We got washed through by the 
spray. Just as we were getting back, a 
whole salvo of big shells fell just in front 
of us and short of our big ships. The 
skipper and I did rapid calculations as to 
how long it would take them to reload, 
fire again, time of flight, etc., as we had 
to go right through the spot. We came 
to the conclusion that, as they were short 
a bit, they would probably go up a bit, and 
(they?) didn't, but luckily they altered 
deflection, and the next fell right astern 
of us. Anyhow, we managed to come 
out of that row without the ship or a man 
on board being touched. 

What the Big Ships Stand 

"It's extraordinary the amount of knock- 
ing about the big ships can stand. One saw 
them hit, and they seemed to be one mass 
of flame and smoke, and you think they're 
gone, but when the smoke clears away they 
are apparently none the worse and still 



200 SEA WARFARE 

firing away. But to see a ship blow up is 
a terrible and wonderful sight; an enormous 
volume of flame and smoke almost 200 feet 
high and great pieces of metal, etc., blown 
sky-high, and then when the smoke clears 
not a sign of the ship. We saw one other 
extraordinary sight. Of course, you know 
the North Sea is very shallow. We came 
across a Hun cruiser absolutely on end, his 
stern on the bottom and his bow sticking 
up about 30 feet in the water; and a little 
farther on a destroyer in precisely the same 
position. 

"I couldn't be certain, but I rather think 
I saw your old ship crashing along and 
blazing away, but I expect you have heard 
from some of your pals. But the night was 
far and away the worse time of all. It was 
pitch dark, and, of course, absolutely no 
lights, and the firing seems so much more 
at night, as you could see the flashes light- 
ing up the sky, and it seemed to make much 
more noise, and you could see ships on 
fire and blowing up. Of course we showed 
absolutely no lights. One expected to be 



DESTROYERS AT JUTLAND 201 

surprised any moment, and eventually 
we were. We suddenly found ourselves 
within 1000 yards of two or three big Hun 
cruisers. They switched on their search- 
lights and started firing like nothing on 
earth. Then they put their searchlights 
on us, but for some extraordinary reason 
did not fire on us. As, of course, we were 
going full speed we lost them in a moment, 
but I must say, that I, and I think every- 
body else, thought that that was the end, 
but one does not feel afraid or panicky. I 
think I felt rather cooler then than at any 
other time. I asked lots of people after- 
wards what they felt like, and they all said 
the same thing. It all happens in a few 
seconds; one hasn't time to think; but 
never in all my life have I been so thank- 
ful to see daylight again — and I don't 
think I ever want to see another night like 
that — it's such an awful strain. One does 
not notice it at the time, but it's the re- 
action afterwards. 

"I never noticed I was tired till I got 
back to harbour, and then we all turned in 



202 SEA WARFARE 

and absolutely slept like logs. We were 
seventy-two hours with little or no sleep. 
The skipper was perfectly wonderful. He 
never left the bridge for a minute for 
twenty-four hours, and was on the bridge or 
in the chart-house the whole time we were 
out (the chart-house is an airy dog-kennel 
that opens off the bridge) and I've never 
seen anybody so cool and unruffled. He 
stood there smoking his pipe as if nothing 
out of the ordinary were happening. 

"One quite forgot all about time. I was 
relieved at 4 a. m., and on looking at my 
watch found I had been up there nearly 
twelve hours, and then discovered I was 
rather hungry. The skipper and I had 
some cheese and biscuits, ham sandwiches, 
and water on the bridge, and then I went 
down and brewed some cocoa and ship's 
biscuit." 



Not in the thick of the fight, 
Not in the press of the odds, 

Do the heroes come to their height 
Or we know the demi-gods. 

That stands over till peace. 

We can only perceive 
Men returned from the seas, 

Very grateful for leave. 

They grant us sudden days 

Snatched from their business of war. 
We are too close to appraise 

What manner of men they are. 

And whether their names go down 

With age-kept victories, 
or whether they battle and drown 

Unreckoned is hid from our eyes. 

203 



204 SEA WARFARE 

They are too near to be great. 
But our children shall understand 

When and how our fate 

Was changed, and by whose hand. 

Our children shall measure their worth. 

We are content to be blind, 
For we know that we walk on a new-born 
earth 

With the saviours of mankind. 



IV 

THE MINDS OF MEN 

How It Is Done 

What mystery is there like the mystery 
of the other man's jobs — or what world so 
cut off as that which he enters when he goes 
to it? The eminent surgeon is altogether 
such an one as ourselves, even till his hand 
falls on the knob of the theatre door. After 
that, in the silence, among the ether fumes, 
no man except his acolytes, and they won't 
tell, has ever seen his face. So with the 
unconsidered curate. Yet, before the war, 
he had more experience of the business and 
detail of death than any of the people who 
contemned him. His face also, as he stands 
his bedside-watches — that countenance with 
which he shall justify himself to his Maker 

205 



206 SEA WARFARE 

— none have ever looked upon. Even the 
ditcher is a priest of mysteries at the high 
moment when he lays out in his mind his 
levels and the fall of the water that he alone 
can draw off clearly. But catch any of these 
men five minutes after they have left their 
altars, and you will find the doors are 
shut. 

Chance sent me almost immediately after 
the Jutland fight a lieutenant of one of the 
destroyers engaged. Among other matters, 
I asked him if there was any particular 
noise. 

"Well, I haven't been in the trenches, of 
course," he replied, "but I don't think there 
could have been much more noise than 
there was." 

This bears out a report of a destroyer 
who could not be certain whether an 
enemy battleship had blown up or not, 
saying that, in that particular corner, it 
would have been impossible to identify 
anything less than the explosion of a whole 
magazine. 

"It wasn't exactly noise," he reflected. 



DESTROYERS AT JUTLAND 207 

"Noise is what you take in from outside. 
This was inside you. It seemed to lift you 
right out of everything." 

"And how did the light affect one?" I 
asked, trying to work out a theory that noise 
and light produced beyond known endurance 
form an unknown anaesthetic and stimulant, 
comparable to, but infinitely more potent 
than, the soothing effect of the smoke-pall 
of ancient battles. 

"The lights were rather curious," was the 
answer. "I don't know that one noticed 
searchlights particularly, unless they meant 
business; but when a lot of big guns 
loosed off together, the whole sea was 
lit up and you could see our destroyers 
running about like cockroaches on a tin 
soup-plate." 

"Then is black the best colour for our 
destroyers? Some commanders seem to 
think we ought to use grey." 

"Blessed if / know," said young Dante. 
"Everything shows black in that light. 
Then it all goes out again with a bang. 
Trying for the eyes if you are spotting." 



208 SEA WARFARE 

Ship Dogs 

"And how did the dogs take it?" I pur- 
sued. There are several destroyers more or 
less owned by pet dogs, who start life as the 
chance-found property of a stoker, and end 
in supreme command of the bridge. 

"Most of 'em didn't like it a bit. They 
went below one time, and wanted to be 
loved. They knew it wasn't ordinary 
practice." 

"What did Arabella do?" I had heard 
a good deal of Arabella. 

"Oh, Arabella's quite different. Her job 
has always been to look after her master's 
pyjamas — folded up at the head of the 
bunk, you know. She found out pretty 
soon the bridge was no place for a lady, 
so she hopped downstairs and got in. You 
know how she makes three little jumps 
to it — first, on to the chair; then on the 
flap-table, and then up on the pillow. 
When the show was over, there she was as 
usual." 

"Was she glad to see her master?" 



DESTROYERS AT JUTLAND 209 

"Ra-ather. Arabella was the bold, gay 
lady-dog then /" 

Now Arabella is between nine and eleven 
and a half inches long. 

"Does the Hun run to pets at all?" 

"I shouldn't say so. He's an unsym- 
pathetic felon — the Hun. But he might 
cherish a dachshund or so. We never picked 
up any ships' pets off him, and I'm sure we 
should if there had been." 

That I believed as implicitly as the tale of 
a destroyer attack some months ago, the 
object of which was to flush Zeppelins. It 
succeeded, for the flotilla was attacked by 
several. Right in the middle of the flurry, 
a destroyer asked permission to stop and 
lower dinghy to pick up ship's dog which had 
fallen overboard. Permission was granted, 
and the dog was duly rescued. "Lord 
knows what the Hun made of it," said my 
informant. "He was rumbling round, 
dropping bombs; and the dinghy was 
digging out for all she was worth, and the 
Dog-Fiend was swimming for Dunkirk. 
It must have looked rather mad from above. 



210 SEA WARFARE 

But they saved the Dog-Fiend, and then 
everybody swore he was a German spy in 
disguise." 

The Fight 

"And— about this Jutland fight?" I 
hinted, not for the first time. 

"Oh, that was just a fight. There was 
more of it than any other fight, I suppose, 
but I expect all modern naval actions must 
be pretty much the same." 

"But what does one do — how does one 
feel?" I insisted, though I knew it was 
hopeless. 

" One does one's job. Things are happen- 
ing all the time. A man may be right 
under your nose one minute — serving a gun 
or something — and the next minute he isn't 
there." 

"And one notices that at the time?" 

"Yes. But there's no time to keep on 
noticing it. You've got to carry on some- 
how or other, or your show stops. I tell 
you what one does notice, though. If one 
goes below for anything, or has to pass 



DESTROYERS AT JUTLAND 211 

through a flat somewhere, and one sees the 
old wardroom clock ticking, or a photograph 
pinned up, or anything of that sort, one 
notices that. Oh yes, and there was another 
thing — the way a ship seemed to blow up if 
you were far off her. You'd see a glare, 
then a blaze, and then the smoke — miles 
high, lifting quite slowly. Then you'd get 
the row and the jar of it — just like bumping 
over submarines. Then, a long while after 
p'raps, you run through a regular rain of 
bits of burnt paper coming down on the 
decks — like showers of volcanic ash, you 
know." The door of the operating-room 
seemed just about to open, but it shut 
again. 

"And the Huns' gunnery?" 

"That was various. Sometimes they 
began quite well, and went to pieces after 
they'd been strafed a little; but sometimes 
they picked up again. There was one Hun- 
boat that got no end of a hammering, and 
it seemed to do her gunnery good. She 
improved tremendously till we sank her. I 
expect we'd knocked out some scientific 



212 SEA WARFARE 

Hun in the controls, and he'd been succeeded 
by a man who knew how." 

It used to be "Fritz" last year when 
they spoke of the enemy. Now it is Hun 
or, as I have heard, " Yahun," being a super- 
lative of Yahoo. In the Napoleonic wars 
we called the Frenchmen too many names 
for any one of them to endure; but this 
is the age of standardisation. 

"And what about our lower deck?" I 
continued. 

"They? Oh, they carried on as usual. 
It takes a lot to impress the lower deck 
when they're busy." And he mentioned 
several little things that confirmed this. 
They had a great deal to do, and they did 
it serenely because they had been trained 
to carry on under all conditions without 
panicking. What they did in the way of 
running repairs was even more wonderful, 
if that be possible, than their normal 
routine. 

The lower deck nowadays is full of 
strange fish with unlooked-for accomplish- 
ments, as in the recorded case of two simple 



DESTROYERS AT JUTLAND 213 

seamen of a destroyer who, when need was 
sorest, came to the front as trained experts 

in first-aid. 

"And now — what about the actual Hun 
losses at Jutland?" I ventured. 

"You've seen the list, haven't you?" 

"Yes, but it occurred to me — that they 
might have been a shade under-estimated, 
and I thought perhaps " 

A perfectly plain asbestos fire-curtain 
descended in front of the already locked 
door. It was none of his business to 
dispute the drive. If there were any 
discrepancies between estimate and results, 
one might be sure that the enemy knew 
about them, which was the chief thing that 

mattered. 

It was, said he, Joss that the light was 
so bad at the hour of the last round-up 
when our main fleet had come down from 
the north and shoveUed the Hun round on 
his tracks. Per contra, had it been any 
other kind of weather, the odds were the 
Hun would not have ventured so far. As 
it was, the Hun's fleet had come out and 



214 SEA WARFARE 

gone back again, none the better for air and 
exercise. We must be thankful for what 
we had managed to pick up. But talking 
of picking up, there was an instance of 
almost unparalleled Joss which had stuck 
in his memory. A soldier-man, related 
to one of the officers in one of our ships 
that was put down, had got five days' 
leave from the trenches which he spent 
with his relative aboard, and thus dropped 
in for the whole performance. He had 
been employed in helping to spot, and 
had lived up a mast till the ship sank, 
when he stepped off into the water and 
swam about till he was fished out and put 
ashore. By that time, the tale goes, 
his engine-room-dried khaki had shrunk 
half-way up his legs and arms, in which 
costume he reported himself to the War 
Office, and pleaded for one little day's 
extension of leave to make himself decent. 
"Not a bit of it," said the War Office. "If 
you choose to spend your leave playing with 
sailor-men and getting wet all over, that's 
your concern. You will return to duty by 



DESTROYERS AT JUTLAND 215 

to-night's boat." (This may be a libel on 
the W.O., but it sounds very like them.) 
"And he had to," said the boy, "but I 
expect he spent the next week at Head- 
quarters telling fat generals all about the 
fight." 

"And, of course, the Admiralty gave 
you all lots of leave?" 

"Us? Yes, heaps. We had nothing to 
do except clean down and oil up, and 
be ready to go to sea again in a few 
hours." 

That little fact was brought out at the 
end of almost every destroyer's report. 
"Having returned to base at such and such 
a time, I took in oil, etc., and reported 
ready for sea at — o'clock." When you 
think of the amount of work a ship needs 
even after peace manoeuvres, you can 
realise what has to be done on the heels 
of an action. And, as there is nothing like 
housework for the troubled soul of a woman, 
so a general clean-up is good for sailors. 
I had this from a petty officer who had also 
passed through deep waters. "If you've 



216 SEA WARFARE 

seen your best friend go from alongside 
you, and your own officer, and your own 
boat's crew with him, and things of that 
kind, a man's best comfort is small varie- 
gated jobs which he is damned for continu- 
ous. 



The Silent Navy 

Presently my friend of the destroyer 
went back to his stark, desolate life, where 
feelings do not count, and the fact of his 
being cold, wet, sea-sick, sleepless, or dog- 
tired had no bearing whatever on his 
business, which was to turn out at any 
hour in any weather and do or endure, 
decently, according to ritual, what that 
hour and that weather demanded. It is 
hard to reach the kernel of Navy minds. 
The unbribable seas and mechanisms they 
work on and through have given them the 
simplicity of elements and machines. The 
habit of dealing with swift accident, a life 
of closest and strictest association with 
their own caste as well as contact with 



DESTROYERS AT JUTLAND 217 

all kinds of men all earth over, have added 
an immense cunning to those qualities; 
and that they are from early youth cut 
out of all feelings that may come between 
them and their ends, makes them more 
incomprehensible than Jesuits, even to their 
own people. What, then, must they be to 
the enemy? 

Here is a Service which prowls forth 
and achieves, at the lowest, something of a 
victory. How far-reaching a one only the 
war's end will reveal. It returns in gloomy 
silence, broken by the occasional hoot 
of the long-shore loafer, after issuing a 
bulletin which though it may enlighten the 
professional mind does not exhilarate the 
layman. Meantime the enemy triumphs, 
wirelessly, far and wide. A few frigid and 
perfunctory-seeming contradictions are put 
forward against his resounding claims; a 
Naval expert or two is heard talking "off"; 
the rest is silence. Anon, the enemy, after 
a prodigious amount of explanation which 
not even the neutrals seem to take any 
interest in, revises his claims, and, very 



218 SEA WARFARE 

modestly, enlarges his losses. Still no sign. 
After weeks there appears a document 
giving our version of the affair, which is 
as colourless, detached, and scrupulously 
impartial as the findings of a prize-court. 
It opines that the list of enemy losses which 
it submits "give the minimum in regard to 
numbers though it is possibly not entirely 
accurate in regard to the particular class 
of vessel, especially those that were sunk 
during the night attacks." Here the mat- 
ter rests and remains — just like our block- 
ade. There is an insolence about it all 
that makes one gasp. 

Yet that insolence springs naturally and 
unconsciously as an oath, out of the same 
spirit that caused the destroyer to pick up 
the dog. The reports themselves, and 
tenfold more the stories not in the reports, 
are charged with it, but no words by any 
outsider can reproduce just that professional 
tone and touch. A man writing home after 
the fight, points out that the great consola- 
tion for not having cleaned up the enemy 
altogether was that "anyhow those East 



DESTROYERS AT JUTLAND 219 

Coast devils" — a fellow-squadron, if yon 
please, which up till Jutland had had most 
of the fighting — "were not there. They 
missed that show. We were as cock-ahoop 
as a girl who had been to a dance that her 
sister has missed." 

This was one of the figures in that 
dance: 

"A little British destroyer, her midships 
rent by a great shell meant for a battle- 
cruiser; exuding steam from every pore; 
able to go ahead but not to steer; unable 
to get out of anybody's way, likely to be 
rammed by any one of a dozen ships; 
her syren whimpering: 'Let me through! 
Make way!'; her crew fallen in aft dressed 
in life-belts ready for her final plunge, 
and cheering wildly as it might have been 
an enthusiastic crowd when the King 
passes." 

Let us close on that note. We have 
been compassed about so long and so 
blindingly by wonders and miracles; so 
overwhelmed by revelations of the spirit 
of men in the basest and most high; 



220 SEA WARFARE 

that we have neither time to keep tally 
of these furious days, nor mind to discern 
upon which hour of them our world's fate 
hung. 



THE NEUTRAL 

Brethren, how shall it fare with me 

When the war is laid aside, 
If it be proven that I am he 

For whom a world has died ? 

If it be proven that all my good, 
And the greater good I will make, 

Were purchased me by a multitude 
Who suffered for my sake ? 

That I was delivered by mere mankind 

Vowed to one sacrifice, 
And not, as I hold them, battle-blind, 

But dying with opened eyes ? 

That they did not ask me to draw the sword 
When they stood to endure their lot, 

That they only looked to me for a word, 
And I answered I knew them not ? 

221 



222 SEA WARFARE 

If it be found, when the battle clears, 

Their death has set me free, 
Then how shall I live with myself through 
the years 

Which they have bought for me ? 

Brethren, how must it fare with me, 

Or how am I justified, 
If it be proven that I am he 

For whom mankind has died; 
If it be proven that I am he 

Who being questioned denied ? 



THE END 



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